Availability In Today's Extended Enterprise
Availability is best described as the time a particular resource is accessible and
usable. Customers in today's networked data centers require continuous
availability -- systems, data and applications need to be accessible "7x24x365."
Part of Sun's mission in the data center is to enable continuous application
access with a predictable service level. Sun today guarantees up to 99.95 percent
uptime on single Sun Enterprise 10000
systems, and up to 99.975 percent on clustered Sun Enterprise 10000 systems.
To further impact availability, Sun has developed a unique SunUP Program which
enables Sun customers and service providers to raise overall service levels for
their business and mission-critical applications. Unlike other vendors in the
industry who focus primarily on product offerings to improve availability, Sun's
program goes beyond products to address the complete customer environment -
process, people, and product issues.
Measuring the Impact of Availability
Sample Availability Terms
and Metrics
| Class | Downtime/Yr | % |
|---|
| Conventional | 3-5 days | 99.000 |
| Highly Available | 8.5 hours | 99.9 |
| Fault Resilient | 1 hour | 99.99 |
| Fault Tolerant | 5 minutes | 99.999 |
(Source: major telecommunications company)
|
Availability is typically measured as a percentage of total up-time or services
available over the course of a year. For example, a 99.99 percent availability requirement translates roughly to 52.8 minutes of downtime, whereas 99.9 percent availability requirement means about 8 hours of downtime per year.
Downtime can be looked upon as either planned maintenance or unscheduled outages. Even relatively brief
unscheduled outages can have a huge financial impact on
business.
Average Cost per Hour
of Downtime
| Industry | Cost |
| Financial Broker | $6.5M |
| Credit Card Sales | $2.6M |
| Pay-Per-View Television | $150K |
| Airline Reservations | $90K |
| Banking - ATM | $14K |
(Source: International Data Corporation)
|
How expensive is downtime? Hardware repairs and missed sales opportunities are the most obvious costs.
Lost productivity/idle employees, technical support costs and loss of customer confidence should also be
considered.
If a credit card sales center were to down, for example, the cost to
the company could amount to as much as $2.6M per hour.
Studies show that approximately 80 percent of unplanned downtime is attributed to
process and people issues, with only 20 percent attributed to the
hardware or software product.
Sun's Availability Philosophy
Sun's philosophy for availability is fundamentally different from other vendors.
Our focus is on the 3 P's (Process, People, Product). In the Process area we focus
on deploying best practices and ensuring the best methodologies are used in
running applications. In the People area, the focus is on improving your staffs' skills by providing training and technical expertise. In the Product
area the focus is on maximizing the availability of the single system and
clustering for the highest availability environments. It is a total systems approach to
availability aimed at integrating servers, software and storage to match the
availability requirements of your application.
For more information on availability download a PDF or PostScript version of the SunUP Program Brief.
