Prevent Unexpected Interruptions in Production Operations
Unscheduled downtime of mission-critical systems can be caused by unforeseen events like equipment failures or system errors, leading to possible production delays, customer dissatisfaction, and credibility harm.
Common Paints Points of Unscheduled Downtime
Across the spectrum of industries, one thing all companies agree on is that the cost of unplanned downtime is quite substantial. Surprisingly, many companies are not tracking downtime cost with any quantifiable metrics—until an outage occurs.
Decreased Productivity
Unplanned downtime disrupts workflows, leading to slower production cycles and reduced overall output.
Increased Labor Costs
Idle employees are still compensated, leading to increased labor expenses without productivity gains.
Reduced Revenue
Downtime directly translates to lost production and sales opportunities, resulting in a significant financial hit.
Elevated Expenses
Downtime necessitates expensive repairs, overtime for resolving issues, and potential waste of materials.
How Much Unplanned Downtime Can Your Organization Afford?
Driven by the nature of always-on applications, preventing downtime has become a top priority for organizations across all market sectors—from manufacturing, building security, and telecommunications to financial services, public safety, and healthcare.
Moreover, organizations require investments in high application availability to compete successfully in a global economy, comply with regulations, mitigate potential disasters, and plan for business continuity. All these factors contribute to a growing demand for high-performance availability solutions to keep applications up and running.
There are many cost-effective uptime solutions available on the market today including standard servers with backup, continuous data replication, traditional high-availability clusters, virtualization, and fault-tolerant solutions. But with so many options, figuring out which technology approach is appropriate for your organization's specific needs can seem overwhelming.
Prevent Downtime: Where You Should Start
Understanding the criticality of your computing environment is a good place to start. This involves assessing downtime consequences on an application-by-application basis. If you’ve virtualized applications to save costs and optimize resources, remember that your virtualized servers present a single point of failure that extends to all the virtual machines running on them, thereby increasing the potential impact of downtime.
Depending on the criticality of your applications, you may be able to get by with the availability features built into your existing infrastructure or you may need to invest in a more powerful and reliable availability solution—one that proactively prevents downtime rather than just speeding and simplifying recovery.
Rule of Nines: Why You Need 99.99999% Availability in an Always-On World
The Rule of Nines is as follows: for every “9” an IT team can achieve in increasing their availability, the more they can reduce downtime and increase system profitability. Let’s look at how each additional “9” is being achieved today, and how it impacts business performance.
99%
Most availability solutions deliver 99% uptime which may sound pretty good to most organizations until you realize 99% means 87.6 hours of unplanned downtime per year.
99.9%
Many affordable hardware redundant solutions can translate to 99.9% uptime which converts to roughly around 8.76 hours of unplanned downtime per year. Losing a business day in productivity per year is still too much for the bottom line to bear.
99.99%
Server cluster technology is used for high availability solutions with failover support for 99.99% uptime translating to 52.6 minutes of downtime during the year.
99.999%
Fault-tolerant hardware solutions deliver 99.999% availability or better, translating to 5.26 minutes of unplanned downtime per year. Software fault tolerance delivers similar results using industry-standard servers running in parallel, enabling a single application to live on two virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously. If one VM fails, the application continues to run on the other VM with no interruptions or data loss. Thus, virtualization delivers the fifth 9.
99.99999%
Achieving seven nines (99.99999%) of uptime requires robust engineering practices, redundancy, and failover mechanisms to ensure continuous operation. Seven nines of uptime signifies a near-perfect state of availability, and represents an extremely high level of reliability, meaning a system is expected to be operational for nearly the entire year. This uptime percentage model equates to an expected average system downtime of less than 3.15 seconds per year.
All that being said, not all fault-tolerant solutions are created equal. Some emulate fault tolerance but end up creating lots of overhead, which drags down performance. You need true fault tolerance to avoid performance problems and meet all your mission-critical application or service requirements where even a short interruption can have significant consequences.
Reach out to Penguin Solutions today to learn more about our 5 9's and 7 9's fault-tolerant hardware and software solutions to help enable your organization to run critical applications without downtime or data loss, in edge or data center environments.
Talk to the Experts at Penguin Solutions
Reach out today and learn more how we can help you address the critical importance of operational uptime and data integrity within your enterprise data center and to the operational edges of your network.