The Issue:

The average consumer has become accustomed to the availability of a shopping site at 2 a.m., and sees that popular Internet search or portal sites are “never” down. These experiences now inform their expectations for computing in the workplace. Now, even in environments like higher education, where 24/7 availability would have been considered silly just a few years ago, each successive cohort of students arrives on campus with higher expectations. “We have to have all systems available all the time now. Our students have been spoiled by availability and we are struggling to keep up,” says the CIO of a university.

In other industries such as financial services, e-commerce, retail and especially healthcare,with the shift from paper charts to all-electronic records, high availability has always been required. But while each individual IT component may have failures, the application “experience” is now expected to be always-on, even for non-critical applications.

In the past, IT folks spoke of disaster recovery (DR) quite often. Planning for disastrous disruptions to the IT infrastructure or staff because of fire, earthquake, or the like, with timelines from minutes to days for restoration of critical services. The new mantra is, “business continuance planning,” (BCP) meaning planning to ensure that a company’s critical online processes stay available regardless of what’s happened to the infrastructure or people. The old goal – for periods of normal operation – was uptime on par with the telephone system: 99.999%, the now canonical “five nines” IT managers have aimed to achieve for years and usually fallen short of.

Now, though, the bar has been raised, and even in times of disruption, the expectation is for continuous service. “Our goal is not ‘five nines’, it is one-zero-zero [100%]. Any downtime results in immediate losses and is unacceptable,” says the data center manager of a financial services company.

These higher expectations of availability have not been, unfortunately, accompanied by similarly large increases in budgets. The idea of utility computing – the “always-on” version of IT where applications are as available as water from a tap – has caught on at a visceral level, but the high expectations and rosy scenarios gloss over the sophistication of the architecture and technology required. How then are IT departments to deliver?

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