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High availability of enterprise systems is a prerequisite for business continuity - and for sustaining services to an organization’s end users and end customers. Achieving high availability (HA) during a period of rapid technology change can be challenging for many customers, who see too many obstacles to ensuring high availability across many servers - and across the enterprise.
The process of IT transformation brings new opportunities to improve high availability, especially for end-to-end applications that span the enterprise and that leverage the computing power of many servers across the network. That is because IT transformation opens the door to doing things differently - breaking down the information silos that prevented a deeper integration across business units - and a unified view of all networked servers. In so doing, there is also an opportunity to reduce server footprints via workload consolidation - resulting in more efficient computing and in reduced power/cooling costs. In the process of IT transformation, IT infrastructure is optimized so that workloads run on the platforms that support them with the best performance and the greatest efficiency.
Businesses that want to ensure that end users are able to access key business systems on a 24 x 7 x 365 basis, with little or no perceptible downtime, are studying ways to protect important applications by applying reliable server hardware and HA software to the workloads being deployed. Efficiency in operating these systems is essential to holding down operational costs (opex) associated with IT staff time, system downtime, and power/cooling for deployed systems.
IBM offers hardware and software in a comprehensive approach to ensuring high availability across a range of servers and storage systems and a range of services to protect end-to-end applications with high availability. Specifically, IBM sells hardware with reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features built into the platform while selling software (directly or through partners) that provides virtualization, consolidation, and automation. Importantly, IBM provides software with advanced end-to-end systems management capability to support end-to-end applications that tap many servers across the network. This approach is aimed at ensuring that end users within the organization, and end customers, can continue to access data services across the IT infrastructure, without interruption, providing business resilience and business continuity, even in the event of outages in platforms or networks.
High availability for systems and data is a high-priority goal for business. The business itself is solidly focused on business processes - the processes directly related to providing goods and services to end customers - and the ability to access worldwide business systems anytime, anywhere. This paper describes the relationship between that goal and the IT infrastructure that supports a spectrum of availability, as appropriate, for a wide range of applications and business systems. In today’s networked, Internet-enabled world, the bar has been raised for business expectations about what the IT infrastructure can deliver, in terms of its ability to change as business changes. And yet, the recognition of what it takes to ensure business continuity for business processes is not often considered. As advanced features for Web-enabled systems grow, supporting access from cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and PCs, one could ask: How is this end-to-end business process being supported?
This paper outlines the relationship between the business processes we see every day and the high-availability requirements for the IT systems that deliver the data and business systems on which those business processes depend. The "how-to" of assembling those IT systems is not the focus of this paper, because each organization deploys its own pattern of IT systems, based on the IT skill sets that are present within the organization, and the organization’s preference for leveraging a set of IT technologies.
This paper is aimed at business managers and IT managers who are considering making changes in their current IT infrastructures, with the idea that barriers between today’s islands of automation can be removed and the underlying data and systems can be linked. As this happens, it is important to ensure that these systems are protected by a combination of hardware, software, and services that ensure high availability so that the systems can be accessed whenever needed, from anywhere in the network.
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