Availability Guide for Application Design

What Is Application Availability?
Availability Guide for Application Design—525637-004
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Cost Containment
businesses also need to be able to check customer credit references before charging
that meal at 3 a.m.
Corporate Globalization
In today’s global economy, most large corporations operate in many countries around
the world—and this trend is increasing. The result is that it is always 9 a.m. at a
corporate facility somewhere. Coupled with the expectancy of globally available data,
corporations no longer have a window of inactivity in the middle of the night in which to
bring down their computer systems to perform routine maintenance.
24 by 7 Expectations
The demands of the marketplace have forced the need for continuous operations even
higher. For example, the use of cellular phones, portable PCs and faxes, and wireless
LANs have made access to the world’s information highways easy anytime, anyplace.
Computer systems must be continuously available to meet these needs.
Another example is in stock market trading, where global marketing will likely push the
world’s stock markets to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Cost Containment
Estimates of the cost of downtime vary considerably depending on the industry, the
installation, and the application. The cost of one minute of downtime of a typical
application that processes a high volume of stock transactions will generally be higher,
for example, than for a system running a file server in a development environment.
Even for the diverse range of applications for which NonStop systems are used,
however, survey information about estimated downtime costs is available. HP
conservatively estimates this figure at thousands of dollars per minute. With many of
the computer systems and application designs in use today, such costs easily amount
to millions of dollars per year, often several times the cost of the computer installation
itself.
Outage costs accumulate for the following reasons:
•
Revenue loss
•
Penalties
•
Productivity loss
•
Support and operations costs
•
Reputation costs
Although some additional costs are incurred through making the application continually
available, these costs are usually more than offset by the reduction in support costs.
Each of these costs is explained in the following paragraphs.