High availability (HA) configurations seek to bring downtime to zero - but can increase complexity across the IT organization, often in the form of excess technology, financial, and human capital investments. Learn how application virtualization can reduce planned and unplanned downtime, and deliver greater flexibility.
Reducing the High Cost of High Availability
Centralized Command and Control of Enterprise Applications
The ChallengeBusiness demand is dynamic - and often unpredictable. IT has to be onestep ahead of the business, able to accommodate growth and shift capacityto different applications in real-time to meet the needs of customers andemployees.
Given the integral role technology plays in daily operations, you have achoice: either accept the risk of application downtime or overspend toensure that systems remain available. Both choices come at a price.Accepting risk could lead to slow or unavailable applications, usually duringa spike in use. Essentially, you lose the system when you need it most.Alternatively, you can over-provision, investing time and capital for systemsand applications that will run most of the time at a fraction of capacity.
Because most firms are naturally risk-averse, larger IT investments aremade to maximize up-time. High availability (HA) configurations seek tobring downtime to zero, as tolerance for service or application interruptionbecomes slimmer. As a result, businesses routinely over-provision hardwareand software licenses in mixed-architecture environments to ensure thatmission-critical systems are always available. Proliferation of theseheterogeneous and redundant "silos" causes costs to escalate rapidly.
The Costs and Complexity of High AvailabilityHA environments usually consist of custom scripts developed over time toaddress specific problems. This reactive approach leads to excesstechnology, financial, and human capital investments. HA is costly, requiringextra servers and software licenses simply to implement the environment.This requires an increased financial cost up front and over the life of theequipment and software. With maintenance fees on software licensescreeping past 20% per year, your actual spend can be twice as high as theinitial license costs.
The complexity of the HA configuration coupled with the priority ofapplications supported by HA require more employee time. System andapplication administrators spend more time managing the environment.Your IT team spends time keeping existing systems running at the expenseof new initiatives that can fuel company growth. The opportunity cost isreal.
Because business demands it, up-time trumps efficiency; HA environmentstend to rely on manual processes, static configurations and looselydocumented custom scripts to ensure that an application will continue tooperate when planned or unplanned changes occur. The cost isunnecessarily inflated, eroding margins and diverting skilled IT resourcesfrom value-creating endeavors to more tactical support roles. Reducing the High Cost of High AvailabilityPage 2
IT organizations would realize both a cost advantage and a significantROI opportunity from introducing an automated solution to dynamicallyprovision resources in a heterogeneous environment. Such a solution notonly ensures HA capabilities for enterprise applications, it enables moreefficient use of existing systems and application resources.
TMDataSynapse FabricServerDataSynapse FabricServer centralizes the command and control ofapplication deployment and execution by virtualizing applications andguaranteeing that capacity is available on demand.
By expanding and contracting the use of infrastructure resourcesdynamically in a mixed-architecture environment, FabricServer deliverseconomies of scale through the more efficient use of availabletechnology. FabricServer creates a real-time infrastructure by a poolingand adaptively allocating resources across the data center, harnessing thepower of the entire infrastructure to support specific applications. Theflexibility afforded by FabricServer streamlines application and systemutilization, reduces operating costs, and contributes to a HA environment".the increasing costs of downtime have caused more without introducing additional complexity. With FabricServer, you will notorganizations to improve...application availability." have to deploy extra hardware and purchase additional software licenses.- Gartner, April 2006 FabricServer stores application servers, code, and configurations in acomponent called the FabricBroker. FabricBroker is the heart... [download for more]
