High Availability – what does it mean to your business?
Availability. Everyone is talking about it as apparently everyone can provide it, one way or another. Unfortunately, once you dig just slightly below the surface it becomes apparent that there are nearly as many definitions for availability as there are vendors touting it.
Some consider availability of the data while others mean availability of the server or storage sub-system. However, they all use the same buzz words like ‘disaster recovery’, ‘real-time’, ‘business continuity’ and ‘continuous’ or ‘high’ availability which has caused a lot of confusion and misconception within the market on what all these things really mean. Many will even try to convince businesses that a few hours of downtime are acceptable. All the noise and hype has made life very difficult for those businesses looking to better protect themselves and their applications from downtime due to failures and outages.
It wasn’t long ago that there were only a few essential systems that require a high degree of uptime and those were generally only within very large organisations. Today, however, with the extremely competitive marketplace and the ever-growing compliance regulations, businesses of all sizes must maintain a high level of availability for their systems and applications.
When researching the options it’s important to cut through some of the noise and false claims to really understand their value and, more importantly, what they will actually do for your business.
Tags: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, High Availability, server availability
