Demand for High Application Availability Soars

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
INTELLIGENCE CORP.

Demand for High Application
Availability Soars


May 2009

© Copyright 2009, Information Technology Intelligence Corp. (ITIC) All rights reserved. Other products and companies referred to herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or mark holders.
Executive Summary "Time is money. You can't do business if you can't access your applications. I won't settle for anything less than 99.99% application availability." Steven Sommer, veteran CIO/CTO There is no aspect more critical to a business than the ability of its end users, customers, business partners and suppliers to have high availability access the corporate applications. If applications are unavailable, business ceases. And corporations know it. Four out of five businesses - 81% -- now require higher availability for their major business applications than they did two or three years ago. Those are the results of a March 2009 joint ITIC and Stratus Technologies survey which polled C-level executives and IT managers at 300 corporations worldwide (See Exhibit 1) on the application availability costs and issues. But nearly three quarters of the respondents - 73% -- are unable to quantify the cost of downtime or gauge the impact to the business. Even more startling is that 61% of respondents said they don't track the losses associated with application downtime or, are unsure of the impact that downtime has on their operations. The need for high application availability has never been greater. In the 1980s and 1990s, 99% uptime was the acceptable norm. Not so today, when organizations rely completely on their networks and applications to conduct business. ?Two nines? or 99% uptime is the equivalent of 87.6 hours of annual datacenter downtime. By contrast, 99.99% high availability (HA) decreases application unavailability rates to approximately four hours per annum. Those firms that do not keep track of the number and severity of their outages have no way of gauging the financial and data losses to the business. Even a cursory comparison indicates the cost disparities between 99% uptime and 99.99% HA. For example, a small or midsize business which estimates the hourly cost of downtime to be a very conservative $10,000 per hour, would incur losses of $876,000 per year at a data center with 99% application availability (87 hours downtime). By contrast, a company whose data center operations is 99.99% HA (four hours downtime), losses would be $87,600 - one-tenth of a firm with conventional 99% availability. Technology and business trends increase the need for HA availability and heighten the threat of downtime. The rise of Web-based applications and new technologies like virtualization and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), as well as the emergence of public or shared cloud computing models are designed to maximize productivity. But without the proper safeguards these new datacenter paradigms may raise the risk of downtime. The Association for Computer Operations Management/ Data Center Institute (AFCOM) forecasts that one-in-four data centers will experience a serious business disruption over the next five years. Leonard Eckhaus, AFCOM's founder and past president says ?the threat is worsening due to the economic © Copyright 2009, Information Technology Intelligence Corp. (ITIC) All rights reserved. Other products and companies referred to herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies or mark holders. Page 2 downturn which has caused IT departments to slash budgets.? AFCOM's predictions are based on its recent survey of 300 corporations; its findings are consistent with those of ITIC/Stratus. Two out of five companies in the ITIC/Stratus poll say budgetary constraints have left them with no money to acquire ?extras? such as incremental software packages and hardware that could help their firms maintain high availability and costly outages. HA is a priority for nearly one-third of the respondents; 29% indicated their firms require high availability, while an elite 7% of high end enterprises said they had to have Continuous Availability - 99.999% uptime. ?Time is money. You can't do business if you can't access your applications,? says Steven Sommer who spent 25 years as CIO and CTO at Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, a New York City law firm.... [download for more]