The Essence of Uptime

Uptime is a key performance indicator (KPI). Some would say it is the key performance indicator, the sine qua non, of productive computing. If you can’t keep your system operational, you have nothing. None of the many functionalities – the bells and whistles – matter one whit if your customers can’t access your site or service. The expectation in […]

EPO: Emergency Power Off or Extremely Probable Outage?

In 1959 there was a fire in the Pentagon.  It resulted in seven million dollars’ worth of damage, taking out three mainframe computers.  In today’s currency that would be $58.1 million. The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) was then tasked with creating rules and regulations to manage risks in computer environments.  They came up with […]

Cloud Service Level Agreement Expectations

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are essential in the IT business. IT managers should know what to expect from their service providers. You should fully understand any SLA before signing it – especially when it comes to uptime.  Let’s explore. SLA Overview Everyone who has been around IT support has heard of Service Level Agreements. As […]

Downtime is no Longer Acceptable

If you went to bestbuy.com and the site was unavailable, how long would it take for you to go to amazon.com or elsewhere to find what you wanted?  On average, it’s less than 30 seconds; it used to be much longer, but our society has grown impatient.  If you’re not available when customers are looking […]

The Need for Increased Availability is Now

The 2nd half of another year is here once again and as usual, it gives us one more moment to reflect on our New Year goals, how far away we are from achieving them and a chance to develop new methods to meet them. But for analysts in the tech industry, this is a time […]

The True Costs of Downtime for IT

Downtime is a dirty word in the IT business. Unplanned outages are unacceptable and should not be tolerated. In a universe where customers expect services to be available 99.999% of the time, any time your IT service offering is down is costly to your business. And the true cost of downtime may be more than […]

5 Ways to Increase Application Availability

A service provider that offers software-as-a-service or another cloud-based solution should understand what customers are looking for and what compels those very customers to choose an off-premise, “cloud-based” solution vs. the more traditional on-premise, self-hosted solution. As a cloud service provider ourselves, we set out to understand how our customers went about choosing one service […]

Multi Site Exchange DAG Failover – Solving WAN IP Availability

So you decided to deploy a high availability Microsoft Exchange environment.  You created a Database Availability Group for the databases on the Mailbox servers, carefully thought out the mailbox server roles and even deployed multiple Client Access Servers at two different sites with a nice WAN connection between them for timely synchronization. Your Exchange DR […]

Multihomed ISP Link Availability Challenges

We talk to organizations every day looking to increase the availability of on-premise hosted applications using multihomed ISPs. The most common applications are Exchange and Remote Desktop, both essential components to ensuring workforce productivity for remote or offsite employees.  While managing outbound connectivity through more than one ISP is a breeze today since so many firewall vendors […]

Downtime costs $7900 per minute, on average

The cost of datacenter downtime has increased more than 40% for many companies over the last 3 years, according to a recent study by Ponemon Institute, sponsored by Emerson Network Power. The report analyzes 67 datacenters during 2013 across a variety of different industries ranging in size from 2500 sq. ft to over 46,000 sq. […]