High Availability (HA)

Precisely offers high availability and disaster recovery for IBM i and AIX Power Systems

What is High Availability?

High availability (HA) refers to the continuous availability of applications and data to authorized users and includes all aspects of a hardware and software environment that could fail (disk, CPU, mainframe, physical site, regional outage, etc.).

A high availability solution will protect from both planned and unplanned downtime — the first due to circumstances outside of the solution provider’s control and the second due to server and system maintenance, upgrade, backup, etc. 90% of downtime is due to planned outages. Ensuring high availability from all types of outages, planned and unplanned, is important.

Analysis of High Availability

There is a considerable amount of work that goes into analyzing HA. The weakest link of most systems is often the data storage components. Using a RAID design (Redundant Array of Independent Discs) makes data much more redundant in a useful, logical manner.

Setting up a backup service can also help with HA. This process, known as failover, relies on a switch to a remote server in times of need.

Measurements of HA

For software, the key metrics to calculate availability are Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

RTO is the maximum amount of time elapsed during a disruption before the quantity of data lost during that period exceeds a predetermined threshold.
RPO is the maximum amount of time elapsed before a disruption blocks the normal flow of operations to a predetermined extent.

How Precisely Can Help

Precisely knows that all downtime is bad for business. Precisely can assure that your IBM Power Systems are highly available, achieving the HA standard that is required to run your business smoothly.