What does 99% uptime mean? Every business seeks perfection when it comes to application availability, yet few ever meet it.
Most availability solutions deliver 99 percent — which may sound pretty good to most organizations until you realize 99 percent means 87.6 hours of unplanned downtime per year. According to research from the Aberdeen Group, the average cost of downtime due to data loss can amount to more than $163,000 an hour for companies. Thus, the Rule of Nines: 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.
99.9% is Good Business Practice
There are plenty of availability solutions delivering average results — for example, an x86 server can be counted on to deliver 99% availability if that’s all your business is looking for. But with today’s availability solutions, 99.9 percent is very attainable. Affordable servers more powerful than the average x86 can be combined with redundant power supplies, fans, a RAID array, and of course, good business practices to maintain and protect your system.
The result?
99.9% translates to around 8.76 hours of unplanned downtime per year. That’s a massive improvement over nearly 90 hours of downtime at 99 percent, but for many companies, losing a business day in productivity per year is still too much for their bottom line to bear.
What does 99.99 availability correspond to?
The secret to achieving the next “9” for 99.99% is cluster technology. Often referred to as high availability solutions, clusters are essentially two or more physical servers connected in a single network. If one server fails, application support resumes on a second server.
Clusters can range from 99.95 to 99.99% availability depending on how well built the cluster is and how quickly failover can be achieved. Some clustered applications such as databases can’t failover quickly enough because they must check file integrity and replay transactions logs after a failure, which delays application start-up.
How do you get five nines availability?
Now imagine your business was able to add the most elusive “9” to achieve 99.999% availability. What would that take? Fault-tolerant systems are delivering the “Holy Grail” of availability today by working through faults and continuing to run without disrupting applications at all — preventing any downtime resulting from a system failure.
Fault-tolerant hardware solutions deliver 99.999% availability or better, translating to less than five 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.
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 application requirements.
99.999%: An Example
For almost sixty years, Kaye Instruments has been at the forefront of high accuracy process measurement for the biopharmaceutical industry, and its equipment has become the standard in high accuracy measurement systems.
In pharmaceutical manufacturing, it is typical for products to be made in extremely large batches, yet with large batch production it’s impossible to test every vile for quality. This is why, in today’s pharmaceutical world, quality needs to be built directly into the manufacturing process design. If a manufacturer does not have data to support the continual monitoring of a product, that product cannot be released.
Therefore, any downtime within these processes results in revenue lost. This critical importance of uptime and data integrity led Kaye to rely on Stratus to be an integral part of their solutions. To learn more about how Kaye Instruments is working with Stratus, check out the video below:
