Providing Application High Availability Stephanie Balaouras Principal Analyst Forrester Research

Ground Rules & Expectations House Keeping! All teleconference lines are open... Mute yourself when not speaking and don’t put call on ‘hold’. Collaborate! This is a discussion, not a presentation… Ask questions, make comments and share experiences. And beware, Forrester may call on you! Are we in a ‘rabbit hole’? If the conversation has gone down a substantial ‘rabbit hole’… … Forrester will interject, but you decide whether or not to persist.

Agenda Understanding disaster recovery and availability Measuring availability Availability strategies Recommendations

Definition: disaster recovery (DR) Focuses on recovery procedures of critical IT systems following a significant disaster event or disruption that renders the primary site unavailable Position: After the title slide. Focus: These points should focus on ways to 1) cut costs, and/or 2) mitigate risks. Narrative and flow: The three bullets should build. Since this is intro slide, we should not go into details here – just tell them what we’re going to tell them.

Definition: high availability (HA) Focuses on the technology and processes to prevent application/service outages at the primary site or in a specific IT system domain

HA and DR requirements

Definition: continuous availability Combines DR preparedness and high availability strategies to ensure IT service availability whether there is a system or site failure

Sources of service outages Apps Unplanned downtime Planned downtime Data integrity (data corruption, bugs) Hardware upgrades (servers, storage, networks etc.) Data center/facilities failures (extreme weather, power outages, manmade events.) Software upgrades (OS, DB, app) Maintenance (backups, patches) Hardware failures (servers, storage, networks etc.) Process failures (human error, coding errors) Data migrations

Agenda Understanding disaster recovery and availability Measuring availability Availability strategies Recommendations

Availability focuses on service, not elements Availability is the aggregation of all elements supporting the IT service. Most components spec to 99.999% availability Combined IT service availability would fall below 99.999% Scheduled downtime is a critical part of the availability design Most downtime is planned!

Availability is more than just “9”s “9”s are misleading Consider 99.9% availability (8 hours/year outage for 24x7), What is the difference between: 8 AM to 4 PM on the last Friday of the quarter Biweekly outages of 30 min at 4 AM local time Timing and duration are more important than total downtime Well written SLAs must take all these factors into account

Availability metrics ITIL availability management Availability of IT services compared to agreed upon SLAs Duration of disruptions to IT services Number of disruptions to IT services Number of infrastructure components with availability monitoring Number implemented measures to improve availability Chip

Agenda Understanding disaster recovery and availability Measuring availability Availability strategies Recommendations

Recovery time objective (RTO) Local HA options Seconds FT hardware FT VMs Clustering Local standby Recovery time objective (RTO) Restart VMs Minutes This is the data protection continuum today. It ranges from continuous data protection technologies to traditional backup to tape. Which technology you select or incorporate into your overall data protection strategy is a function of two things: Your recovery time and recover point objectives and how much money your willing to spend. Your recovery time objective or RTO is a measure of how quickly you need to recover from a business disruption such as a hardware failure, software failure, human error or some other type of disruption. For industries that can measure their cost of downtime in millions of dollars per hour or may have mandate by government body such as the SEC, their RTO must be near instantaneous. Your recovery point objective or RPO is your sensitivity to data loss. So for example, a trading system at a financial institution may have a RPO of zero data loss – because any data loss could mean the loss of millions of dollars. The more stringent your RTO/RPO the more you require a disk-based solution like continuous data protection but the more this type of solution will cost you. In order to come up with the most cost-effective data protection strategy, you need to determine the RTO/RPO for your business applications and data sets and determine what you are willing to spend to support that. So to help you do that, let’s spend some time on the next couple of slides talking about the characteristics of disk and tape based solutions and give you a high-level framework for incorporating the two. System backup and restore Hours Less More Cost

IT service continuity (DR) options

Agenda Understanding disaster recovery and availability Measuring availability Availability strategies Recommendations

Recommendations Downtime isn’t just the result of disasters Make availability a part of every enterprise architecture, app development and IT infrastructure decision The most seamless form of continuous availability is baked into the application Preventing failures by architecture/design is cheaper than providing recovery for poorly designed applications

Recommendations (cont.) Design applications for availability Use reliable elements — server, storage, OS, etc. Select HA and DR options for critical systems Scrutinize operational process to reduce human error Make availability a key component of acceptance testing

Thank You! Megan O'Donoghue Forrester Research, Inc. +1 617/613-6059 modonoghue@forrester.com Stephanie Balaouras Forrester Research, Inc. +1 617.613.6440 sbalaouras@forrester.com Karen Popeo Forrester Research, Inc. +1 617/613-6381 kpopeo@forrester.com Scott Sheehy Forrester Research, Inc. +1 617/613-6523 ssheehy@forrester.com