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Cost of Downtime
The driving force behind the high-availability systems has been the elimination of costs
associated with downtime. The cost of downtime formula must include several factors. Among
these are:
•
Productivity loss
•
IM costs
•
Lost transactions
•
Customer or end user dissatisfaction
Each factor is weighted differently, depending on the critical nature of each factor as it pertains to
your business and to your specific application systems. For example, downtime during peak hours
of a point-of-sale operation would have a much greater impact on customer satisfaction issues
than downtime in an end-of-day email server backup operation. To understand the true cost of
computer downtime in your business environment, you must examine the impact and contribution
to increased costs of each factor as it applies to your business-critical applications.
Benefits of Clustering
With the causes enumerated and the costs understood, it is clear that the Novell High Availability
Server can eliminate your concerns and ease your tightening networking budget through
•
Availability - Simply defined, availability is the measure of how well a computer system can
continuously deliver services to clients. This is dependent upon the system’s ability to
prevent or recover from failures or faults.
•
Scalability - Clustering for scalability means increasing performance beyond that of a single
computer node by adding more nodes to the cluster. Performance scalability across cluster
nodes is difficult to achieve and requires not only scalable hardware, but also scalable
software, for example, a parallel database.
•
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
-
By reducing downtime, you can eliminate both the high
costs of administrative support and, at the same time, the lost revenue caused by downtime
and customer dissatisfaction.
Summary
In general, clusters can provide both high availability and scalability for business-critical
applications. In today’s market, experts estimate that approximately 80-90% of clusters are used
to take advantage of the increase in server availability created by clusters.
The use of clusters to reduce computer system downtime has a direct impact on a company’s
revenue and the MIS department budget. The impact depends on your calculated costs of
downtime. In most cases, the cost of installing and maintaining a cluster are likely to be offset by
the reduction in downtime costs, and, as businesses’ reliance on computer systems intensifies, the
cost of downtime is likely to increase.
