Re: High availability questions

[D.BALE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I agree that most of us do not need 24/7.  Can we afford 30 minutes
unscheduled downtime?  Yes.  Four hours?  Yes, but my boss starts to hurt me
after that <g>.  24 hours?  Now we're talking some fairly significant losses,
plus OUR REPUTATION with our customers.  Assuming you've got 24x7 IBM support,
what kind of problems are possible that would cause an outage of more than 24
hours?  I've never seen it in my experience in the IBM midrange; maybe I'm
just lucky.

Brad, while I respect your opinions most of the time, I would say that 99% of
the business world would be unable to survive a 6-month cutoff of revenue.  I
have heard that households should build up a 6-month safety net, and I'm doing
my darnedest to get there.  But businesses?

Dan Bale
IT - AS/400
Handleman Company
248-362-4400  Ext. 4952

-------------------------- Original Message --------------------------
Lurton,

I agree that there are situations where 24/7 is a necessity.  Like a
hospital pharmacy where the wrong dose, or interaction, or a four hour
delay because of unexpected down time could cause death.  I know I
wouldn't trust the last printed report as a backup, IMHO they are
worthless before the ink dries.

I'm sure that someone in your company worked out the numbers and decided
that the one time in x years that your AS/400 went down it was worth the
<100k + redundant AS/400 + communications.

But for a lot of companies the cost of 24/7 is not justifiable in either
lost revenue opportunities or damaged reputation.

As you said, you never had to use it in real life.  I guess whatever
let's the powers to be sleep easy is really all the justification
necessary.


Lurton Keel wrote:
>
> I disagree about the necessity of 24/7.
<<snip>>
> 10 minutes of down time was totally unacceptable.
> We implemented Vision Solutions to a backup AS/400 across town.
<<snip>>
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