RE: High availability questions

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Stone, Brad V (TC) wrote:

> Disagree all you want.  When your machine goes down, it will cause problems.
> It will slow you down.  But it won't kill you or force your out of business.
> If it does, you've got more problems than a computer that's down.
> 
> 10 minutes of downtime is only unacceptable because:
> 
> 1.  We rely too much on technology
> 2.  We no longer teach manual methods (which was the norm before computers)
> 3.  We promise what we can't deliver, and cause higher expectations

I agree with you regarding 10 minutes.   However, when a system goes down,
is it realistic to expect to be able to recover in 10 minutes?

If I have a power supply failure in my AS/400 (which has happened before)
it will take 20-30 minutes just to get a CE to look at it.   Then, it'll
take him time to get the appropriate parts and fix it...  Usually a few
hours.

What if the parts aren't available locally??  Now we could add a day to
the downtime.

If the failure should cause data loss, then I have the added problems of
reinstalling the whole system, restoring from backup, etc.  This could 
cost me at least an additional day of downtime, plus data loss (things
that have been changed since the last backup are gone)

So... expecting the downtime to be 10 minutes isn't realistic. 

By contrast, having a redundant computer in another location with all of
the data mirrored will result is much less down time.  

> I can just see 2 years from now people whining because their cell phones
> don't work  50/7 (50 states, 7 continents).  :)
> 
> Brad

Heh... I already hear people whining about that :)



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