Has the economic meltdown taken its toll on your business? Is the endless onslaught of bad news making it difficult to maintain a positive perspective? The good news is that despite the economic downturn, there’s never been a better time to raise the bar for your IT capabilities. Mature virtualization solutions, new affordable uptime solutions, powerful integrated capabilities and an increased focus on operational simplicity all enable businesses like yours to enhance IT operations — without biting off too much of your budget. Here are five things you can do immediately and affordably to add value to your business.
® by Stratus Technologies, The Availability Company April, 2009
HOW TO
Reduce IT Costs
Five Ways to Help Your Business Survive
The Economic Downturn Has the economic meltdown taken its toll on your business? Is the endless onslaught of bad news making it difficult to maintain a positive perspective? The good news is that despite the economic downturn, there's never been a better time to raise the bar for your IT capabilities. Mature virtualization solutions, new affordable uptime solutions, powerful integrated capabilities and an increased focus on operational simplicity all enable businesses like yours to enhance IT operations - without biting off too much of your budget. Here are five things you can do immediately and affordably to add value to your business: 1. Increase service levels Uptime is good for business. And while 99% uptime sounds terrific, the flip side is that 1% downtime means 87.5 hours per year - or more than 100 minutes per week - of service interruption. That's not good for business. Avoid the inevitable side effects of too much downtime - declining revenues, loss of access to services, irate customers, financial penalties, loss of data - by stepping up your service levels. Rule of thumb: For every "nine" of uptime availability you add to your service levels, you reduce average downtime - and whatever it's costing you in terms of time and money - by a factor of 10. AAvvaaiillaabbiilliittyy LLeevveell AAvveerraaggee YYeeaarrllyy DDoowwnnttiimmee Five nines is considered the CCoonnvveennttiioonnaall 9999%% 8877 hhoouurrss,, 3366 mmiinnuutteess gold standard for service level agreements (SLAs) today. HHiigghh 9999..99%% 88 hhoouurrss,, 4466 mmiinnuutteess AAvvaaiillaabbiilliittyy 9999..9955%% 44 hhoouurrss,, 2233 mmiinnuutteess Stratus has led the industry in 9999..9999%% ~~5522 mmiinnuutteess uptime achievement nearly CCoonnttiinnuuoouuss 9999..999999%% ~~55 mmiinnuutteess 30 years. AAvvaaiillaabbiilliittyy 9999..99999999%% ~~3322 sseeccoonnddss ®Increasing your service levels has never been easier or more affordable. Stratus solutions help you: . Get better than five-nines uptime with servers engineered to prevent downtime and data loss If your SLAs call for continuous uptime performance, you need a fault-tolerant server solution. The ®worldwide base of installed Stratus ftServer platforms currently delivers greater than five-nines ® ® ®(99.999%) uptime - a measurement that includes the server and the Microsoft Windows or Red Hat ® ®Linux operating system or VMware virtualization layer. That's less than 5 minutes of downtime per year on average. . Transform conventional x86 servers into a high-availability solution that delivers better than four-nines uptime Stratus AvanceT software gives you greater than 99.99% uptime within minutes. Avance transforms a pair of standard x86 servers into a high-availability platform with embedded virtualization capabilities at a cost just about any business can afford. . Sustain five-nines service levels across your mission-critical business processes For vital business processes that depend on much more than your server, Stratus Managed Services achieve 99.999% service levels - guaranteed. Customized services protect your high-volume, high-value transactions, critical data and real-time processes, while reducing fixed costs for IT infrastructure from any vendor. . Add open, flexible, high-performance storage designed for continuous availability Address dedicated, shared and networked storage requirements with ftScalable storage, an economical, scalable, 2U powerhouse that is packed with innovative availability features. This open fault-tolerant storage platform supports ftServer systems and x86 servers from other suppliers, enabling common storage management and 24/7 service. The risk of not purchasing an IT solution that your business really needs is that it may end up costing you more e.g., penalties, loss of business.
Five Ways to Help Your Business Survive the Economic Downturn Page 1 2. Capitalize on the benefits of virtualization Virtualization is now mainstream technology. It promises to drastically reduce costs by enabling multiple applications to "time share" server resources. Expect an immediate return on your investment if you consolidate multiple underutilized servers onto a single virtualized server. You'll save on hardware a... [download for more]
