Planned downtime: How your disaster recovery solution can reduce costs and shrink outage Windows (page 1 of 2)

But these technologies can also be leveraged to reduce the costs and outage windows associated with planned downtime events - providing a significant return on investment (ROI) bonus.


The Escalation of Planned Downtime
Planned downtime refers to any planned administrative operations that could potentially interrupt or slow down service, such as server upgrades, data movement, server consolidation and site maintenance. Planned downtime occurs far more often than unplanned downtime, partly because hardware systems are more robust and resilient than ever, and mean time between failures is constantly improving.

The frequency of scheduled downtime processes is definitely increasing. A large enterprise datacenter may be running scores of applications, and multiple classes of applications, on hundreds or even thousands of systems. Administrators may schedule modifications almost daily to reconfigure systems, perform upgrades or apply patches. Depending on the processes that are in place, every modification could potentially involve downtime.

Due to their ubiquity, Microsoft products are continually under relentless attack by hackers. In response, Microsoft issues new security patches almost weekly for its operating systems or for Microsoft Exchange, to close the door on a virus or to change the rules for opening attachments. The patches and upgrades are applied at the administrator's discretion, but planned downtime could occur as often as once a week.

Performing these routine operations without disrupting service is a major concern for companies today. The immediacy of online services has produced a culture of end users who are fast approaching zero delay tolerance. For online businesses, for example, an outage or slowdown that lasts 5 or 10 minutes is almost guaranteed to drive impatient customers to competitive sites for goods and services. If they experience the delay again, customers could be gone for good. From the standpoints of revenue and site branding, these are serious concerns.


Leveraging Disaster Recovery Solutions
Data protection and disaster recovery solutions can be leveraged for planned downtime operations, dramatically shrinking both administrative costs and outage windows. These tools automate procedures to make administrators more efficient, reduce the possibility of human error and accelerate processes that may have impact on end users.

The term planned downtime is in fact almost an oxymoron today. The downtime associated with most planned operations that could potentially affect uptime can be virtually eliminated. For example, automated real-time replication of volumes can move data transparently and vendor-independently to other servers at any worldwide location.

Automated stateful failover can move a live application to another server without service interruption. A clustering solution can migrate an entire datacenter to another location. Let's look at some typical examples.

Scenario One: Migrating an Application. Say you want to move all your users to another server. There is no usable server available within the datacenter, so you have to move the application, with all its user groups and all its data, to a server in a datacenter that is two time zones away. Volume management and replication software can mirror the data to a storage volume in the distant datacenter.

Clustering software can move the application to the new server in a failover operation that preserves the state of the application and its user data.