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High availability
High availability is a system design approach and associated service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of operational performance will be met during a contractual measurement period. Users want their systems, for example wrist watches, hospitals, airplanes or computers, to be ready to serve them at all times. Availability refers to the ability of the user community to access the system, whether to submit new work, update or alter existing work, or collect the results of previous work. If a user cannot access the system, it is said to be unavailable.[1] Generally, the term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable.
Percentage calculation
Availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year. The following table shows the downtime that will be allowed for a particular percentage of availability, presuming that the system is required to operate continuously. Service level agreements often refer to monthly downtime or availability in order to calculate service credits to match monthly billing cycles. The following table shows the translation from a given availability percentage to the corresponding amount of time a system would be unavailable per year, month, or week.
High availability
Availability % 90% ("one nine") 95% 97% 98% 99% ("two nines") 99.5% 99.8% 99.9% ("three nines") 99.95% 99.99% ("four nines") 99.999% ("five nines") 99.9999% ("six nines")
Downtime per year 36.5 days 18.25 days 10.96 days 7.30 days 3.65 days 1.83 days 17.52 hours 8.76 hours 4.38 hours 52.56 minutes 5.26 minutes 31.5 seconds
Downtime per month* 72 hours 36 hours 21.6 hours 14.4 hours 7.20 hours 3.60 hours 86.23 minutes 43.2 minutes 21.56 minutes 4.32 minutes 25.9 seconds 2.59 seconds
Downtime per week 16.8 hours 8.4 hours 5.04 hours 3.36 hours 1.68 hours 50.4 minutes 20.16 minutes 10.1 minutes 5.04 minutes 1.01 minutes 6.05 seconds 0.605 seconds
* For monthly calculations, a 30-day month is used Uptime and availability are not synonymous. A system can be up, but not available, as in the case of a network outage. In general, the number of nines is not often used by a network engineer when modeling and measuring availability because it is hard to apply in formula. More often, the unavailability expressed as a probability (like 0.00001), or a downtime per year is quoted. Availability specified as a number of nines is often seen in marketing documents. The use of the "nines" has been called into question, since it does not appropriately reflect that the impact of unavailability varies with its time of occurrence.[2]
High availability
High availability effective with active redundancy. Modeling and simulation is used to evaluate the theoretical reliability for large systems. The outcome of this kind of model is used to evaluate different design options. A model of the entire system is created, and the model is stressed by removing components. Redundancy simulation involves the N-x criteria. N represents the total number of components in the system. x is the number of components used to stress the system. N-1 means the model is stressed by evaluating performance with all possible combinations where one component is faulted. N-2 means the model is stressed by evaluating performance with all possible combinations where two component are faulted simultaneously.
The factors themselves are based on the work of Evan Marcus & Hal Stern.[5]
Costs of unavailability
In a 1998 report from IBM Global Services, unavailable systems are estimated to have cost American businesses $4.54 billion in 1996, due to lost productivity and revenues.[6]
References
[1] Piedad, Floyd. High Availability: Design, Techniques, and Processes, (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=kHB0HdQ98qYC& dq=high+ availability+ floyd+ piedad+ book& printsec=frontcover& source=bn& hl=en& ei=gs0LSrLvBKjm6gOT3ISPCA& sa=X& oi=book_result& ct=result& resnum=7) [2] Evan L. Marcus, The myth of the nines (http:/ / searchstorage. techtarget. com/ tip/ 0,289483,sid5_gci921823,00. html) [3] RFC 992 [4] Ulrik Franke, Pontus Johnson, Johan Knig, Liv Marcks von Wrtemberg: Availability of enterprise IT systems - an expert-based Bayesian model, Proc. Fourth International Workshop on Software Quality and Maintainability (WSQM 2010), Madrid, (http:/ / www. kth. se/ ees/ forskning/ publikationer/ modules/ publications_polopoly/ reports/ 2010/ IR-EE-ICS_2010_047. pdf?l=en_UK) [5] E. Marcus and H. Stern, Blueprints for high availability, second edition. Indianapolis, IN, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003. [6] IBM Global Services, Improving systems availability, IBM Global Services, 1998, (http:/ / www. dis. uniroma1. it/ ~irl/ docs/ availabilitytutorial. pdf)
High availability
External links
Carrier grade:The Myth of the Nines (http://www.pipelinepub.com/0407/pdf/Article 4_Carrier Grade_LTC. pdf) Pipeline PDF Service Availability Reporting (http://themonitoringguy.com/articles/service-availability-reporting/)- A Guide To Service Availability Reporting Cisco IOS Management for High Availability Networking (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk869/tk769/ technologies_white_paper09186a00800a998b.shtml/) - Best Practices White Paper
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported http:/ / creativecommons. org/ licenses/ by-sa/ 3. 0/