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Reducing the High Cost of High Availability
Centralized Command and Control of Enterprise Applications
The Challenge
Business demand is dynamic ... and often unpredictable. IT has to be one step ahead of the business, able to accommodate growth and shift capacity to different applications in real-time to meet the needs of customers and employees.
Given the integral role technology plays in daily operations, you have a choice: either accept the risk of application downtime or overspend to ensure that systems remain available. Both choices come at a price. Accepting risk could lead to slow or unavailable applications, usually during a spike in use. Essentially, you lose the system when you need it most. Alternatively, you can over-provision, investing time and capital for systems and applications that will run most of the time at a fraction of capacity.
Because most firms are naturally risk-averse, larger IT investments are made to maximize up-time. High availability (HA) configurations seek to bring downtime to zero, as tolerance for service or application interruption becomes slimmer. As a result, businesses routinely over-provision hardware and software licenses in mixed-architecture environments to ensure that mission-critical systems are always available. Proliferation of these heterogeneous and redundant "silos" causes costs to escalate rapidly.
The Costs and Complexity of High Availability
HA environments usually consist of custom scripts developed over time to address specific problems. This reactive approach leads to excess technology, financial, and human capital investments. HA is costly, requiring extra servers and software licenses simply to implement the environment. This requires an increased financial cost up front and over the life of the equipment and software. With maintenance fees on software licenses creeping past 20% per year, your actual spend can be twice as high as the initial license costs.
The complexity of the HA configuration coupled with the priority of applications supported by HA require more employee time. System and application administrators spend more time managing the environment. Your IT team spends time keeping existing systems running at the expense of new initiatives that can fuel company growth. The opportunity cost is real.
Because business demands it, up-time trumps efficiency; HA environments tend to rely on manual processes, static configurations and loosely documented custom scripts to ensure that an application will continue to operate when planned or unplanned changes occur. The cost is unnecessarily inflated, eroding margins and diverting skilled IT resources from value-creating endeavors to more tactical support roles.
IT organizations would realize both a cost advantage and a significant ROI opportunity from introducing an automated solution to dynamically provision resources in a heterogeneous environment. Such a solution not only ensures HA capabilities for enterprise applications, it enables more efficient use of existing systems and application resources.
DataSynapse FabricServer
DataSynapse FabricServer centralizes the command and control of application deployment and execution by virtualizing applications and guaranteeing that capacity is available on demand.
By expanding and contracting the use of infrastructure resources dynamically in a mixed-architecture environment, FabricServer delivers economies of scale through the more efficient use of available technology. FabricServer creates a real-time infrastructure by a pooling and adaptively allocating resources across the data center, harnessing the power of the entire infrastructure to support specific applications. The flexibility afforded by FabricServer streamlines application and system utilization, reduces operating costs, and contributes to a HA environment without introducing additional complexity. With FabricServer, you will not have to deploy extra hardware and purchase additional software licenses.
FabricServer stores application servers, code, and configurations in a component called the FabricBroker. FabricBroker is the heart of FabricServer, dynamically disseminating applications across the server farm to run in a flexible environment based on specific roles and priorities defined by the business. The IT team creates rules and policies; FabricServer executes them in real-time and at runtime. Enterprise and custom applications respond to unexpected spikes in end-user demand or degraded platform performance by reassigning resources swiftly and without manual intervention.
The dynamic IT environment enabled by FabricServer gathers and reports an extensive set of metrics in the FabricServer reporting database to help you manage your systems proactively. Administrators can integrate FabricServer with enterprise console tools such as IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter and HP OpenView to provide a comprehensive and consolidated infrastructure reporting and analysis environment. Administrators can audit changes to the resources on which they rely, giving the organization more visibility and control over information to ensure operational integrity.
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