Prevent Unexpected Interruptions in Production Operations
Unscheduled downtime of mission-critical systems can be caused by unforeseen events such as equipment failures or system operator errors, leading to possible production delays, customer dissatisfaction, and reputational risk.
Common Pain Points of Unscheduled Downtime
Across the spectrum of industries, one thing all companies agree on is that the cost of unplanned operational downtime can be quite substantial. Surprisingly, many companies do not track downtime costs with any quantifiable metrics—until an outage occurs.
Decreased Productivity
Unscheduled operational downtime disrupts workflows, leading to slower production cycles reducing overall output.
Increased Labor Costs
Idle employees must still be compensated, leading to increased labor expenses without productivity gains.
Reduced Revenue
Unplanned outages mean lost production and missed sales opportunities imposing a substantial financial toll.
Elevated Expenses
Operational outages waste production materials and can require expensive repairs and staff overtime to resolve.
How Much Unplanned Operational Downtime Can Your Organization Afford?
Driven by the nature of always-on applications, preventing unplanned downtime has become a top priority for organizations across all market sectors—from manufacturing, public safety, telecommunications, and utilities to financial services, smart security, life sciences, and healthcare.
Organizations must invest in high application availability in order to compete successfully in the global economy, comply with regulations, mitigate potential disasters, and ensure business continuity. These factors create an ever-increasing demand for high availability solutions that can 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. With so many options, figuring out which uptime technology approach is best for your organization's specific needs can seem overwhelming.
Preventing Downtime: Where to Start
Understanding the criticality of your compute environment is a good place to begin. This first step involves assessing downtime consequences for each of your applications. If you’ve virtualized applications to save costs and optimize resources, it's important to remember that each virtualized server represents a single point of failure that extends to all of the virtual machines (VMs) running on it, magnifying the potential impact of unscheduled operational downtime.
Depending on the criticality of your applications, you may be able to get by with the availability features built into your existing infrastructure. If not, you will need a more powerful and reliable availability solution 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 an organization's uptime performance.
99%
Most availability solutions deliver 99% uptime which may sound good to most organizations until you realize that 99% uptime is equivalent to 87.6 hours of unplanned downtime each year.
99.9%
Many affordable hardware-redundant solutions offer 99.9% uptime or roughly 8.76 hours of unplanned downtime per year. For most organizations, losing an entire business day's productivity to unscheduled downtime is too much for the bottom line to bear.
99.99%
Server cluster technology offers high availability (HA) solutions with failover support providing 99.99% uptime or 52.6 minutes of unplanned operational downtime over the course of a year.
99.999%
Fault-tolerant hardware solutions deliver 99.999% availability or better, which translates to 5.26 minutes of unplanned downtime per year. Software-based fault tolerance delivers similar results running industry-standard servers in parallel, enabling a single application to live on two VMs simultaneously. If one VM fails, the application continues to run on the other VM with no interruption 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 truly continuous operation. Seven nines of uptime signifies a near-perfect state of availability and an extremely high level of reliability with an expected average system downtime of less than 3.15 seconds per year. Meaning this uptime percentage model expects the system to be operational for nearly the entire year.
Not all fault-tolerant solutions are created equal with some emulating fault tolerance but end up creating lots of overhead that can drag down performance. True fault tolerance is essential to meet all of your mission-critical application and service requirements when even a brief interruption can have significant consequences.
Reach out to Penguin Solutions today to learn more about our five 9's and seven 9's fault-tolerant hardware and software solutions—like Stratus ztC Endurance and Stratus ztC Edge—that help ensure your organization's critical applications can run without unplanned downtime or data loss, whether at the network edge or in a corporate data center environment.
Fault tolerance refers to the ability of a system—hardware, software, or network—to continue functioning properly even if one or more components fail. It ensures minimal or no disruption in service during unexpected failures.
No. High availability reduces downtime, usually by switching to standby components. Fault tolerance keeps everything running with no disruption, even if components fail. It’s a more rigorous level of system resilience.
High availability ensures minimal downtime by reducing failure points, while fault tolerance ensures uninterrupted service even during a failure. Fault tolerance typically involves complete duplication of systems, whereas high availability may rely on failover mechanisms.
Finance, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, power, utility, and cloud service providers rely heavily on fault tolerance.
Talk to the Experts at Penguin Solutions
Reach out today and learn how we can help you achieve the level of operational uptime and data integrity you need in your enterprise data center and at the operational edges of your network.