Are High Availability Solutions Right For Your Business?
The decision to use a High Availability (HA) product is not as straight forward as it would first appear
It is usually an agreement between the business and the IT Department around Service Level Agreements the business requires. This may differ between applications as some businesses have critical applications.
You may also need to consider the fault tolerance of an application before choosing a HA solution. HA is not fault tolerance, as it usually involves some downtime measured in minutes while the HA system takes over the workload from the production system.
Some key questions to ask your business that will help you determine if you need a HA solution are:
- Can the system be down at all?
- What is the business/dollars impact of downtime on the system? (Remember down time can be scheduled or unscheduled).
- If you can’t take the system down for any reason, how do you apply patches, service packs, upgrade databases application upgrades or hardware upgrades?
When you have highly available systems, all these things become a simple matter of failing over to the HA system, doing the maintenance, then failing back to production.
The result of all this is that it isn’t just a technical decision
Management needs to sign off on the decision so the business is ready to pick up the tab for the expense of going down the HA path.
Computer Merchants offers two products (EchoStream and EchoCluster) for AIX systems that, when linked together, provide
- continuous data protection,
- point in time recovery and
- automated failover from production to DR.
It allows for failover of a system or LPAR or application without disturbing other applications or LPARs. This is all managed from one of the easiest to use GUIs, and it is this simplicity that can eliminate the need for special training that is required for competing products.
Call us on 1800 777 111 to discuss if HA is right for you.
