Protecting ME's businesses through high availability

The modern business is a global one that doesn't have time to stop. The massive growth of the Internet and the implications of that marketplace are bringing additional pressure to bear. As one time zone sleeps another wakes up and your business is expected to meet the demands of a 24x7xForever economy. If you're unable to compete on these terms then you can find yourself dead in the water.

As more and more demands are put on businesses to keep pace with faster and faster change, those same demands are being put on the systems that run the business.

The fuel that drives any business is information or data and if the systems on which that data resides cease to operate then you experience an interruption to your business. That interruption can have a catastrophic impact.

This creates a quandary. How do you deploy systems that give you the scalability to deal with the enormous growth in data, at the same time as avoiding downtime and its impact on your business? And, more importantly, how do you maintain Data Availability and avoid the consequences of not doing so?

How can companies in the Middle East know that their businesses are at risk, and what are the effects of data loss on businesses in the ME?

In order to recognise the criticality of Data Availability it is important to understand the risks to your business of failing to adequately protect against unavailability. This is very much dictated by the nature of your business. For example, if a national chain of video shops had a failure that meant they couldn't access their data it would have an impact, but not of the same magnitude as if a trading room in the city or a dot.com had an outage, where the financial impact could run into hundreds of millions of pounds or worse.

Areas of risk:
Lost revenue - for example if you are an airline and your reservation system is down then a potential customer could very easily choose to go to an alternative airline. This would immediately have an impact on revenue through the lost ticket sales occurring during the outage.

Customer satisfaction and retention - the customer may choose to go to the alternative airline next time they need a ticket, resulting in a further impact on long term revenue. In addition to this is the increased cost of winning a new customer rather than retaining an existing one.

Competitiveness - this can be affected in a number of ways. If your systems are down and you are unable to conduct immediate business you are not in a position to compete on any level. If your systems are unavailable and your people are unable to work you are paying them to do nothing. Once back on line you will have to pay them again to do the same work they were previously unable to complete. This has the net result of pushing up costs and reducing competitiveness. Again, any interruption in your business through systems downtime would have an affect on your ability to compete in terms of time to market.

Operational viability - a major site outage can have disastrous consequences. There have been some recent studies in the US that have shown that as many as 43% of companies who have suffered a catastrophic data loss can go out of business permanently.

Corporate reputation - building corporate reputation is a long and costly process. Companies spend millions building their brand and can live and die by the brand and the reputation that goes with it. It is all too easy to damage that reputation. You only have to look at the publicity that eBay gained last year when they had a 22-hour outage. In addition to the estimated $3-$5million cost to the business they also witnessed a 26% drop in their share price.

These are just some of the risks that come with a systems outage and the resulting data unavailability. In reality the knock on effects can go much deeper and the direct effect to your business can be extremely costly.

How can companies in the ME use technology to protect their businesses?
There are a host of enabling VERITAS technologies to allow you to scale the availability index as you scale your business.

At the foot of the mountain are straightforward cold backups, which can be taken when your systems are offline. These days this is unacceptable for most businesses as they don't have the opportunity to take their systems down to perform a backup.

The answer to this is to progress to hot backups, allowing you to perform backups while your systems are still running. But again this can often be deemed unacceptable, as backup is one of the most CPU intensive operations that you can carry out. The result is that users could find their systems slowing down massively. Using server free backup capabilities that are part of VERITAS' VERTEX initiative can eliminate this.

As discussed, backups give you basic protection of data but, should your systems fail, you are left in a position where your data is only as current as your last backup and the time from the last backup to when you recover and restore that backup represents lost data, an interruption to your business and all the associated risks. This can be addressed through the storage checkpoint and rollback capabilities found in our Database Edition products further up the curve.

When you do have a system failure, the quicker you can recover your system the lower the impact. One way to address this is through the use of a VERITAS File System, which, because of its journaled nature, means massively faster recovery times.

To protect yourself from disk failure VERITAS Volume Manager gives you mirroring and data redundancy capabilities. Not only that, but you also avoid having to bring systems offline for routine maintenance tasks like adding more disk or growing and shrinking file systems or volumes.

In an Oracle environment you can further shrink the backup window by using VERITAS' Database Edition for Oracle. This product gives you the ability to do things like Block Level Incremental Backup (BLIB). Also it brings the functionality of the VERITAS File System with other enhancements such as improving performance over that of writing to raw partition. Again, you can enhance uptime with technology such as storage checkpoints and snapshots allowing you to shrink the backup window further and also rollback from corrupt data entries without having to restore from a backup.

If a host failure did occur it wouldn't matter if the data on your disks were intact, you still wouldn't have a route to access this data. This can be overcome through the use of VERITAS Cluster Server. When one host fails another one can take over the workload, providing an immediate alternative route to your data.

To reach the top of the availability curve protection from a complete site outage is required. VERITAS' replication technology means you can always have an up to date copy of your data on an alternative site. When combined with Global Cluster Manager this provides the ability to fail one site over to a remote site to avoid the consequences of an interruption to your business.

Do companies in the Middle East really need 'High Availability'?
High Availability is a must for almost any business in this day and age to address current potential problems and also to give you the scalability to deal proactively with future potential problems.

The level of availability is up to you. You know your business best and you know where you are at risk. This just touches on some of the technology available, but does demonstrate how VERITAS can help you to decide how high up the availability curve you need to be. We can also provide you with a strong, vendor independent platform on which to build towards the peak of the availability mountain.