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You realize that a little downtime is expected from time to time. However, do you calculate what the downtime of mission critical applications could cost your business? In this post, I cover the high cost of backup and recovery for business critical applications, and discuss how the SUSE High Availabiliy suite can solve these issues.
Ack! My critical apps went down. Now what?!
In this case, time really is money! You need to know your Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This is the maximum tolerable period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident – including what this could cost you in lost sales. For example, if you perform backups every 4 hours, can you afford to lose 3 hrs and 59 minutes of data?
In early 2011, a Forrester study found only 15% of companies surveyed knew the real cost of system down time , a cool $145,000 per hour.
Then you need to know your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). This is the duration of time that a service level must be restored after a disaster or disruption (especially if you are offering SaaS to your customers.) It can include the time for trying to fix the problem without a recovery, the recovery itself, testing, and the communication to your users.
Enter: the IT hero
In short, no matter how you have backed up your mission critical applications, you still have downtime. Downtime costs money, and new clustering and replication technologies can minimize that downtime to minutes. For example, you can shrink a $145,000 one hour downtime bill to only $4833.00 for two minutes lost – more on that below.
If you have clear answers to RPO and RTO for your critical apps, then you realize these apps need to be highly available. But, what if your RPO could shrink to 2 minutes and your RTO didn’t exist because you (the IT hero) have implemented an automatic failover for your core business applications?
SUSE takes the cost out of downtime
The SUSE High Availability Extension is an affordable suite of open source clustering technologies that you can use to implement high-availability physical and virtual Linux clusters–so you don’t get stuck with downtime bills again.
This suite of open source clustering technologies is typically used for mission-critical Linux applications like core business support applications or revenue-generating applications like point-of-sale. By increasing the service availability of apps like these, you can rest easy knowing your business is protected from network failures, and able to quickly failover to standby systems that are set anywhere in the world via the geo clustering feature.
Why clustering and replication for a failover plan?
Clustering and replication are time-proven methods that increase service availability through hardware and software redundancy. Businesses are increasingly using Linux for mission-critical workloads, such as databases; line of business applications such as ERP and CRM; online transactions processing; and business intelligence applications.
Go to Part 2 to learn what features come with the SUSE High Availability Extension and why we like it.
The post Do You Have The Right Failover Plan For Your Mission Critical Apps? [SUSE] appeared first on Softchoice Advisor.
