Introduction to NonStop Operations Management

Overview of NonStop Operations Management
Introduction to NonStop Operations Management–125507
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Maximizing Availability
Alternate Ways of Measuring Down Time
Depending on specific business needs, down time may be measured in ways other than
user-outage minutes. For example, a site might be obligated to pay a penalty for each
transaction that does not get processed while an application is down. Such a site might
supplement its measure of down time by keeping records of the number of transactions it
normally processes by minute and by day of the week. If an outage occurs, for example,
at 10 a.m. on Tuesday morning and lasts for 15 minutes, the site can calculate the
average number of transactions that would normally be processed during that period.
Subsequently, the site pays a corresponding penalty to its customer.
Using this method leads to significantly different outage costs, depending on the time of
day and the day of the week. An hour-long outage at 2 a.m. on Monday morning might
carry a negligible penalty when compared with a 15-minute outage at 5 p.m. on a Friday.
Maximizing Availability
Maximizing the availability of your systems, networks, and applications can be achieved
by reducing or eliminating outages, both planned and unplanned.
Reducing or Eliminating Planned Outages
Planned outages occur when there are changes that must be implemented and the
computing environment must be stopped to implement the changes. An example of such
a change is the installation of a new version of the operating system. You can reduce or
eliminate planned outages by:
•
Performing changes online. Online change is any change that can be performed
while the system is still operational. Being able to make changes to your hardware
or software online is one way to reduce—or even eliminate—system and application
down time.
•
Reducing the time required for planned outages.
Section 7, “Change and Configuration Management,” provides guidelines for managing
planned outages in an operations environment. For comprehensive information about
managing change and for information about change management tools provided by
Tandem, refer to the Availability Guide for Change Management.