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Achieving 99.9998+%, Uptime and Availability

Information is the lifeblood of the global economy. And with worldwide buyers and sellers operating on a 24/7/365 basis, the need for building information systems that approach 100 percent uptime and data availability is more acute than ever. Simply put, the global economy runs on information. More importantly, it runs on available information. The cost of downtime can be crippling or even fatal to an organization.

With this realization IT departments have pushed to create "enterprise class" availability built on an infrastructure that can deliver in excess of 99.9 percent uptime. But for most organizations enterprise class is not good enough. In fact, for years the world's most reliable network operations – the Telcos – have operated with a much higher standard in place: carrier-class availability, delivering at a minimum 99.999 percent availability and uptime that is orders of magnitude better than enterprise class. Carrier-class storage is a new generation of high-availability that meets the 24/7/365 uptime demands. It is easier to manage than traditional methods of achieving high availability and lowers the total cost of ownership of network storage.

Recent history is full of examples of natural and man-made disasters such as the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes in California, the Oakland Hills firestorm, Hurricane Andrew in Florida and the Chicago River flood, one of the costliest disasters in history, causing the failure of more than 120 businesses. These events vividly demonstrate the need for disaster-proof carrier-class storage and highlight the risks that companies run by operating with anything less than the highest availability storage infrastructure.

A recent ZDnet article titled "The new IT Imperative: Make it Bulletproof" makes a strong case for carrier-class availability. "The survival of your company –- as well as that of the free world –- now depends on IT. Internet and Web services have accelerated the consolidation of the global market. Just one destabilized information infrastructure – be it yours, the stock market's, or anyone's – can create ripple effects too profound to ignore. Entire businesses, industries, and governments can be brought to their knees."

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