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Fundamentals of Availability Transcript
Fundamentals of Availability Transcript
Fundamentals of Availability Transcript
Transcript
Slide 1
Welcome to Data Center University™ course on Fundamentals of Availability.
Slide 2: Welcome
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Slide 4: Introduction
In our rapidly changing business world, highly available systems and processes are of critical importance
and are the foundation upon which successful businesses rely. So much so, that according to the National
Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., 93% of businesses that have lost availability in
their data center for 10 days or more have filed for bankruptcy within one year. The cost of one episode of
downtime can cripple an organization. Take for example an e-business. In a case of downtime, not only
would they potentially lose thousands or even millions of dollars in lost revenue, but their top competitor is
only a mouse-click away. Therefore loss is translated not only to lost revenue but also to a loss in customer
loyalty. The challenge of maintaining a highly available network is no longer just the responsibility of the IT
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departments, rather it extends out to management and department heads, as well as the boards which
govern company policy. For this reason, having a sound understanding of the factors that lead to high
availability, threats to availability, and ways to measure availability is imperative regardless of your business
sector.
Physical Infrastructure is the foundation upon which Information Technology (IT) and telecommunication
Networks reside.
Physical Infrastructure consists of the Racks, Power, Cooling, Fire Prevention/Security, Management, and
Services.
Regardless of the line of business, these three objectives ultimately lead to improved earnings and cash
flow. Investments in Physical Infrastructure are made because they both directly and indirectly impact these
three business objectives. Managers purchase items such as generators, air conditioners, physical security
systems, and Uninterruptible Power Supplies to serve as “insurance policies.” For any network or data
center, there are risks of downtime from power and thermal problems, and investing in Physical
Infrastructure mitigates these and other risks. So how does this impact the three core business objectives
above (revenue, cost, and assets)? Revenue streams are slowed or stopped, business costs / expenses
are incurred, and assets are underutilized or underproductive when systems are down. Therefore, the more
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efficient the strategy is in reducing downtime from any cause, the more value it has to the business in
meeting all three objectives.
While these arguments still hold true, today’s rapidly changing IT environments are dictating an additional
criteria for assessing Physical Infrastructure business value. Agility. Business plans must be agile to deal
with changing market conditions, opportunities, and environmental factors. Investments that lock resources
limit the ability to respond in a flexible manner. And when this flexibility or agility is not present, lost
opportunity is the predictable result.
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Reliability is the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions
for a specified period of time.
Availability, on the other hand, is the degree to which a system or component is operational and accessible
when required for use. It can be viewed as the likelihood that the system or component is in a state to
perform its required function under given conditions at a given instant in time. Availability is determined by a
system’s reliability, as well as its recovery time when a failure does occur. When systems have long
continuous operating times, failures are inevitable. Availability is often looked at because, when a failure
does occur, the critical variable now becomes how quickly the system can be recovered. In the data center,
having a reliable system design is the most critical variable, but when a failure occurs, the most important
consideration must be getting the IT equipment and business processes up and running as fast as possible
to keep downtime to a minimum.
According to the IEC (International Electro-technical Commission) there are two basic definitions of a failure:
1. The termination of the ability of the product as a whole to perform its required function.
2. The termination of the ability of any individual component to perform its required function but not
the termination of the ability of the product as a whole to perform.
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MTTR Mean Time to Recover (or Repair), is the expected time to recover a system from a failure. This may
include the time it takes to diagnose the problem, the time it takes to get a repair technician onsite, and the
time it takes to physically repair the system. Similar to MTBF, MTTR is represented in units of hours. MTTR
impacts availability and not reliability. The longer the MTTR, the worse off a system is. Simply put, if it takes
longer to recover a system from a failure, the system is going to have a lower availability. As the MTBF goes
up, availability goes up. As the MTTR goes up, availability goes down.
Let’s take for example two data centers that are both considered 99.999% available. In one year, Data
Center A lost power once, but it lasted for a full 5 minutes. Data Center B lost power 10 times, but for only
30 seconds each time. Both Data Centers were without power for a total of 5 minutes each. The missing
detail is the recovery time. Anytime systems lose power, there is a recovery time in which servers must be
rebooted, data must be recovered, and corrupted systems must be repaired. The Mean Time to Recover
process could take minutes, hours, days, or even weeks. Now, if you consider again the two data centers
that have experienced downtime, you will see that Data Center B that has had 10 instances of power
outages will actually have a much longer duration of downtime, than the data center that only had once
occurrence of downtime. Data Center B will have a significantly higher Mean Time to Recover. It is
because of this dynamic that reliability is equally important to this discussion of availability. Reliability of a
data center talks to the frequency of downtime in a given time frame. There is an inversely proportional
relationship in that as time increases, reliability decreases. Availability, however is only a percentage of
downtime in a given duration.
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Slide 13: Factors that Affect Availability and Reliability
It should be obvious that there are numerous factors that affect data center availability and reliability. Some
of these include AC Power conditions, lack of adequate cooling in the data center, equipment failure, natural
and artificial disasters, and human errors.
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center layout, a hot aisle/cold aisle configuration is used. Hot spots can also be alleviated by the use of
properly sized cooling systems, and supplemental spot coolers and air distribution units.
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groups. With a variety of vendors, contractors and technicians freely accessing the IT equipment, errors are
inevitable.
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Slide 25: Cost of Downtime
And others yet, may lose at a lower rate for a short outage (since revenue is not lost but simply delayed),
and as the duration lengthens, there is an increased likelihood that the revenue will not be recovered.
Regarding customer satisfaction, a short duration may often be acceptable, but as the duration increases,
more customers will become increasingly upset. An example of this might be a car dealership, where
customers are willing to delay a transaction for a day. With significant outages however, public knowledge
often results in damaged brand perception, and inquiries into company operations. All of these activities
result in a downtime cost that begins to accelerate quickly as the duration becomes longer.
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Slide 26: Cost of Downtime
Costs associated with downtime can be classified as direct and indirect. Direct costs are easily identified
and measured in terms of hard dollars. Examples include:
1. Wages and costs of employees that are idled due to the unavailability of the network. Although
some employees will be idle, their salaries and wages continue to be paid. Other employees may
still do some work, but their output will likely be diminished.
2. Lost Revenues are the most obvious cost of downtime because if you cannot process customers,
you cannot conduct business. Electronic commerce magnifies the problem, as eCommerce sales
are entirely dependent on system availability
3. Wages and cost increases due to induced overtime or time spent checking and fixing systems. The
same employees that were idled by the system failure are probably the same employees that will
go back to work and recover the system via data entry. They not only have to do their ‘day job’ of
processing current data, but they must also re-enter any data that was lost due to the system crash,
or enter new data that was handwritten during the system outage. This means additional hours of
work, most often on an overtime basis.
4. Depending on the nature of the affected systems, the legal costs associated with downtime can be
significant. For example, if downtime problems result in a significant drop in share price,
shareholders may initiate a class-action suit if they believe that management and the board were
Fundamentals of Availability P a g e | 10
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negligent in protecting vital assets. In another example, if two companies form a business
partnership in which one company’s ability to conduct business is dependent on the availability of
the other company’s systems, then, depending on the legal structure of the partnership, the first
company may be liable to the second for profits lost during any significant downtime event.
Indirect costs are not easily measured, but impact the business just the same. In 2000, Gartner Group
estimated that 80% of all companies calculating downtime were including indirect costs in their calculations
for the first time.
Examples include: reduced customer satisfaction; lost opportunity of customers that may have gone to
direct competitors during the downtime event; damaged brand perception; and negative public relations.
For example, Energy and Telecommunications organizations may experience lost revenues on the order of
2 to 3 million dollars an hour. Manufacturing, Financial Institutions, Information Technology, Insurance,
Retail and Pharmaceuticals all stand to lose over 1 million dollars an hour.
Fundamentals of Availability P a g e | 11
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Slide 28: Calculating Cost of Downtime
There are many ways to calculate cost of downtime for an organization. For example, one way to estimate
the revenue lost due to a downtime event is to look at normal hourly sales and then multiply that figure by
the number of hours of downtime.
Remember, however, that this is only one component of a larger equation and, by itself, seriously
underestimates the true loss. Another example is loss of productivity.
The most common way to calculate the cost of lost productivity is to first take an average of the hourly
salary, benefits and overhead costs for the affected group. Then, multiply that figure by the number of hours
of downtime.
Because companies are in business to earn profits, the value employees contribute is usually greater than
the cost of employing them.
Therefore, this method provides only a very conservative estimate of the labor cost of downtime.
Fundamentals of Availability P a g e | 12
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Slide 29: Summary
To stay competitive in today’s global marketplace, businesses must strive to achieve high levels of
availability and reliability. While 99.999% availability is the ideal operating condition for most
businesses.
Power outages, inadequate cooling, natural and artificial disasters, and human errors pose a
significant barrier to high availability.
The direct and indirect costs of downtime in many business sectors can be exorbitant, and often is
enough to bankrupt many organizations.
Therefore it is critical for businesses today to calculate their level of availability in order to reduce
risks, and increase overall reliability and availability.
Fundamentals of Availability P a g e | 13
© 2013 Schneider Electric. All rights reserved. All trademarks provided are the property of their respective owners.