Server Downtime What Downtime How To Never Have Server Downtime

Writen by Wes Tafoya

Technology: Secrets on using technology to save large sums of money, increase profits and increase employee productivity.

Part Ι

What IT companies will not (can not) tell you. The 100% business continuity solution.

Technology - Without it, the business world would collapse. Unfortunately, with technology it can also be expensive. Our purpose is to explain to you some how to eliminate a main expensive component of your IT part of your business – Downtime. A seemingly unsolvable and major setback for business and Administrators alike that has many times caused of businesses to

1. file bankruptcy within six months of a crash

2. loss of clients/patients

3. loss of thousands if not millions of dollars annually

4. loss of jobs and inadvertently causing an organization to downsize

5. loss of data and the enormous cost to repair that data – if that is possible

6. and most importantly, the enormous stress on the company and the techs who work so hard to attempt to keep your systems online.

What are the solutions? Well today's standards would ask you to buy an overpriced cluster solution that still only gives 99.9% up-time. That still almost nine hours of down time. My company, BeechTek has talked to many clients using cluster solutions and one thing they honestly admit that they have no idea the system will even kick in if there is a situation that calls for it. We are not including the scripting, management, hardware cost, multiple Operating Systems (OS) and applications, amongst other factors. There are many "solutions" which is a joke when you are the one responsible for your systems staying up.

"Well that is all that is available right? I mean, we can't afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars like the big companies for a state of the art systems." The truth is even big corporations are loosing incredible amount of money, data security and their best technicians are still at a loss trying to engineer a workable solution.

This is where I come in. I feel for business and especially the techs. These guys are the heartbeat of companies and they still get very little respect and even less pay for their brilliant resolve. However, you would be shocked at companies that are too close-minded and terrified of change. Personally I do not lose any sleep if a company doesn't use our technology – their competitors will and we can reduce their operating cost, increase their production rate in many cases both, in many situations by over 50%!! One company will only use IBM hardware. I laughed, "you will spend over $12,000 a month on new hardware, downtime and expensive solutions because of . . . .why??" Do not misunderstand me, I respect IBM and all my competitors. If your hardware vendor has you sold into thinking that its better to have downtime other than save thousands and thousands of dollars that can be used to expand your business – you are perfect bed mates. I'm sure any intelligent person would agree – it doesn't sound intelligent!

I am sure you know this but technology utilized properly should make your company much more capital in return. After all, is the purpose of investing in any technology also the same reason why you invest in the first place, to make money? To the degree and quality one outflows his time, money etc. will be proportionate to what he inflows. While this universal basic philosophy of life holds true, competence, ingenuity and the ability hold your ground and succeed separates those who succeed and become powerful and those who do not. With this said, in intelligent hands, technology can do amazing things but in the wrong hand's it can destroy a business and even lives. However, we all agree it takes money to make money but let me show you some ways to help you with all of that. Here are some ways to profit using technology.

Let us take a server. Although IT companies will never admit it, they count on two things to happen.

Downtime

Servers go down and this is very common. We all agree downtime (the time the server is down or inoperable or inaccessible) makes an IT company lose money, lose clients and even can inadvertently cost lives, we have all agreed on that. We also we have agreed that repairing any data loss and the other problems associated with downtime, to financial loss and bad PR from losing clients (and lost clients) because you could not service them when they needed it is very, very bad.

Well I have some great news for you!

There are a couple of very workable solutions for mission critical servers that we found about that is very affordable.

1. While there are many servers that claim to be fault tolerant, I only found one that is truly a 100% FT server! I am not talking about a mirrored disk or a HD RAID but the whole box. We found a server that does not have one single point of failure! Imagine a whole box that is Fault Tolerant! We also have a written guarantee of 99.999% up-time!

2. Your client needs and can have 99.999% up-time at 100% availability. What does that mean? It means that you will have more chances on winning the lottery then having your server go down. Most redundant and "protected" servers have at the best 99.9%. This is a cluster solution also. This breaks down to about 8hrs and 45 minutes. WOW! That is bad and the accepted standard. Not for my company and if your company has just as much critical data that can't be down this obviously isn't a good solution. So our 100% Fault Tolerant Server will save you thousands if not millions of dollars, precious time and greatly increase employee production. Most importantly it will secure you clients faith in the ability of your company. As far as I know there isn't anyone that wants to hear – "sorry, but we can't service you cause our servers are down." But I could be wrong!

3. Active upgrade – you can test the patches, updates and upgrades before you install. If those new updates are suspected to cause problems, you can "rollback" to the previous setting. How much money and time will that save you? Let us just say that most companies spend thousands of dollars every year to have a special department just to test patches, updates and upgrades not to mention repairing a down server if those updates do not work. Do not forget – although you need to reboot to install these updates – your client still has 100% availability!

4. The NEC Fault Tolerant server supports many Operating systems (OS) through virtualization if needed. If needed you can also have multiple OS's on one server via a virtual environment instead of buying a multitude of additional servers. These machines will even automatically reboot the OS/application in an attempt to get the software back online. Again, there is still 100% availability!

5. Remote management – Lights out computing; Are you vacationing in France? With remote management you will be instantly notified when a clients FT Server is having issues. Note: To this date there have never been any reports of these servers having any problems.

6. These also are all hot swappable HD's.

7. These servers run a little more expensive then a regular server but far less than a cluster solution.

8. There are many additional benefits and features that are very impressive but my job isn't to sell you – it's to educate you that downtime is yesterdays news. The technology is unbelievable, it's new and it works. Of course unless you like yeaterdays gear you will need this to get ahead.

With this said, how much is it to you to finally eradicate downtime?? Do you really want you competition to have this technology before you? Can you see that putting your resources from slow, expensive and unreliable servers to the right equipment will let your techs work on the other important projects (other than downtime)? Do you understand that financial resources you could use for expanding your company and most importantly – the restored faith your clients will have in you?

Good luck!

Wes Tafoya BeechTek.com Wes Tafoya is the Vice President for BeechTek. Unfortunately man of the big companies do not offer real workable ideas and solutions. You can sell companies anything or you can find out what they are going through. So with research and help from Gargantua companies like NEC and others, BeechTek strives to introduce America to solutions unknown in America. If you want to succeed - you need to be ahead of everyone else-are you ahead? Call us today for a presintation or a web cast.