High availability servers play a critical role in ensuring continuous operation, minimizing downtime, and preventing disruptions that could impact your business performance and day-to-day operations. By implementing high availability infrastructure with redundancy, fault tolerance, and failover mechanisms built-in, you can maintain performance even in the face of unexpected failures.
Let’s explore the importance of high availability infrastructure to minimize unexpected downtime, and exactly how high availability servers can provide support.
What’s The True Cost of Downtime?
Downtime. It’s like losing your home internet connection – disruptive and frustrating, preventing you from completing your tasks. Now, scale that disruption to a business level, where even a single minute of downtime disrupts operations and creates significant costs.
Unplanned downtime is costly, both financially and reputationally. Service interruptions negatively impact customer trust, reduce employee productivity, and have a significant financial cost. This is why industries such as finance, healthcare, and eCommerce rely on high availability systems to safeguard their critical operations. These industries handle sensitive data and customer interactions, making uninterrupted service a necessity.
One study found that in higher-risk enterprises like finance and healthcare, downtime can create costs of $5 million per hour in certain scenarios. Additionally, 88% of organizations reported a single hour of downtime that takes mission-critical server hardware and applications offline, averages over $300,000 in costs due to lost business.
What is Five Nines Availability?
To reduce downtime, many businesses set a goal of “five-nines” availability, or 99.999% uptime. This standard requires a service to remain operational and accessible 99.999% of the time within a given period, such as monthly or annually. To meet this level of reliability, businesses can only allow for 5.26 minutes of downtime per year – that’s an average of only 25.9 seconds a month.
In comparison, the average high availability service level agreement (SLA) is considered to be ‘four nines’ or 99.99% uptime, which is equivalent to 5256 minutes of potential downtime per year.
The Business Need for High Availability Servers
A business need is a resource that’s strategically important to your business. Internal teams, partners, and customers expect round-the-clock availability to remain functional. Therefore, investing in software and solutions that have high availability built-in is a priority, not a ‘nice to have’.
High availability infrastructure is designed to eliminate single points of failure and incorporate reliable crossover procedures. Failures can arise from various sources, including software errors, hardware malfunctions, power outages, and even natural disasters.
Here’s why high availability is a key business need:
- Minimized Downtime
Downtime in your business means lost revenue and damaged reputation. High availability servers keep services running smoothly, helping avoid these costly interruptions and ensuring your customers stay satisfied. - Redundancy
By using backup servers, you can keep operations going even if one server fails. This reduces the risk of outages and helps maintain business continuity. - Fault Tolerance
Fault tolerance allows systems to continue running even if something breaks. This means uninterrupted service, which is critical for maintaining operations and keeping your customers happy. - Load Balancing
Load balancing spreads traffic across servers to prevent any one from getting overloaded. This keeps services fast and responsive. - Data Protection
Any industry, but especially finance, healthcare, and eCommerce, rely on high availability to maintain customer trust. Downtime can lead to financial loss or legal issues, so you can use high availability infrastructure to prioritize reliable systems to avoid disruption.
Now we understand the business need, what are the direct benefits of implementing high availability servers within your IT infrastructure?
The Benefits of High Availability Servers
Redundancy
A key feature of high availability servers is greater redundancy. Redundancy is a critical element of high availability. Hardware redundancy ensures spare resources are always available, while software redundancy replicates VMs and applications across multiple nodes, reducing risk. Network redundancy prevents outages by automatically shifting traffic if one link fails, maintaining system connectivity and uptime.
Data Replication
High availability servers offer real-time data replication that minimizes data loss risks, allowing you to recover quickly if a node fails. Some systems use synchronous replication, mirroring data between nodes as changes occur. Replicating data across multiple locations ensures availability even if a site fails, which is especially important for industries that require constant access to up-to-date data.
Failover Mechanisms
Failover mechanisms are vital to high availability, enabling fast transition from a failed component to a spare system. If a node fails, the system automatically migrates virtual machines and data to healthy nodes. IT administrators monitor the system to ensure failover happens seamlessly, keeping business processes running smoothly during technical issues.
High Availability Servers Reduce Costs and Downtime
Ultimately, the greatest benefits of high availability servers are their ability to reduce overall costs, the financial impact of downtime, and the chances of downtime. Gartner found that many businesses don’t account for the true financial impact of downtime. 59% only measure the cost to recover, compared to the impact on overall revenue. While 9% don’t measure at all. This shows why having high availability features in place is so important.
In general, it’s extremely beneficial to choose software that has high availability infrastructure built-in, so you can avoid the costs of downtime and the, sometimes, unmeasurable financial and reputational aftermath. By doing so, you’ll ensure seamless operations and navigate even the smallest amount of downtime with ease.
