High availability
High availability stands for securing the business operations through a smooth running of the IT infrastructure.
The more a company is prepared for a serious system failure, the more the danger of serious consequences, if it comes to a breakdown of the IT components. The topics high availability and disaster recovery strategies are not only among the responsibility of the IT department, but also on the agenda of the management.
The interruptible business process for a company is today a nessential competitive factor. In part it is essential for companies that the IT systems run reliably. Nowadays hardly any business process gets by without IT support.
If the systems fail, it normally leads to financial penalties. In case of a system breakdown there are far more reasons than the often mentioned viruses and worms. Clearly hardware failures, half-baked software and human failures are often a decisive role. in system breakdown causes. To this we need to consider power breakdown, fire, theft, sabotage, storms and floodwaters which are also high risks for the computer systems and data.
Availability and High availability, fault tolerance and SPOFs (single point of failure) are terms, which play an important role in the environment of high availability systems.
The availability of a system or a system component is defined as percental time slice, in which the system or the component of the system runs error-free. The degree of availability is an important measurement for high availability environments.
Opinions differ on the definition of high availability. For some 99 percent are high availability, others need 99.99 percent.
Fault tolerance identifies the capability of an IT system to keep up its functionality even if unpredictable inputs or failures in hardware or software occur. Fault tolerance increases the availability and is indispensable for high availability.
To reach high availability, the whole IT infrastructure, the used hardware as well as software of a HA cluster has to be devoided from single point of failures, components which are able to cause a breakdown of the whole system due to a failure.
There are different possibilities to make a system highly available. The level of high availability depends thereby on the company policy.
→ We make your infrastructure highly available! Contact our sales: vertrieb@atix.de
