IBM Global Services

ITIL Foundation Course V1.0

Introduction to the IT Infrastructure Library

Availability Management

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Module 10
Availability Management

Content:

 Availability Management – objective and overview

 Responsibilities and obligations
 Some definitions
 Important aspects:
– Uptime, downtime, and availability
– Availability measurement
– Availability reporting
 Benefits and risks
 Best practices
 Summary

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Availability Management
Integration into the IPW Model

Implementing your Service Desk infrastructure

IPW Model is a trade mark of Quint Wellington and KPN Telecoms

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Availability Management
Mission Statement

Availability management ensures that IT delivers the right levels of

availability required by the business to satisfy its business objectives and to
deliver the quality of service demanded by its customers.
Availability Management should ensure that the required level of availability is provided.
The measurement and monitoring of IT availability is a key activity to ensure that
availability levels are being met consistently.
Availability Management should look continuously to optimize the availability of the IT
Infrastructure, services, and supporting organisation, in order to provide cost-effective
availability improvements that can deliver proven business enhancements to customers.

Goal of Availability Management:

 Forecast, planning, and management of services availability, to ensure that:
– All services are based on appropriate and latest CIs
– For CIs not supported internally, appropriate agreements exist with third-party
suppliers
– Changes are suggested in order to avoid future service downtime
 Ensures that SLA-agreed availability is met

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Availability Management
Definitions (1)

Availability: measured by Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).

 Ability of an IT service or component to perform its required function at a
stated instant, or over a stated period of time
 Underpinned by reliability, maintainability, serviceability, and resilience of the
IT infrastructure
Reliability: measured by Mean Time Between System Incidents (MTBSI)
 Ability to work without operational failure
 Depends on the probability of failure of each component, the resilience built
into the IT infrastructure, and the preventive maintenance applied to prevent
a failure from occurring
Maintainability: measured by the Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)
 Ability to be retained or restored to an operational state
 Depends on anticipation, detection, diagnosis, resolution, recovery from
failures, and restoration of data and IT service

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Availability Management
Definitions (2)

Serviceability: cannot be measured as a specific metric

 Ability to maintain the availability, reliability, and maintainability provided by
the contractual agreements with the IT service providers
Resilience: or Fault Tolerance
 Ability of an IT service to remain operational in spite of malfunction by one or
more subcomponents

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Availability Management
Tasks

Availability
Monitoring, planning
Review, and
Assessment Availability
plan

Availability
Managemen
t
Availability
Improveme Identificatio
nt n
Availability
Requiremen
ts

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Availability Management
Inputs and Outputs
Inputs:
 Availability, reliability, and
maintainability requirements of the
business for new or enhanced IT
services.
 Business Impact Assessment (BIA)
for each vital business function
underpinned by the IT infrastructure.
 Information on IT service and
component failures coming from
incidents and problems.
 Configuration and monitoring data
 SLA achievements
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Outputs:
 Availability and recovery design
criteria for new or enhanced IT
services
 Availability techniques that will be
deployed to provide additional
infrastructure resilience
Availability  Availability reporting to reflect the
business, IT support, and user
Management perspectives
 Monitoring requirement for IT
components that allow the detection
of deviations in availability
 Availability Plan for the proactive
improvement of IT infrastructure
availability
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Availability Management
Uptime, Downtime, and Availability
MTTR

Recognition Repair Recovery

Incident Diagnosis Recovery Incident

MTBF

MTBSI

Time

MTTR - Mean Time to Repair  DOWNTIME  Maintainability

MTBF - Mean Time Between Failure  UPTIME  Availability (Serviceability)
MTBSI - Mean Time Between System Incident Average Reliability Reliability

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Availability Management
Availability Measurements (1)

When is a service not available?

”A service is not available to a customer if the locally required functions cannot

be used, although the agreed conditions for the provision of the service are
fulfilled."

A simple calculation of availability in %:

Agreed service time - 100

X
Downtime
Agreed service time 1

But what does 98% availability mean?

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Availability Management
Availability Measurement (2)

Serial Parallel

Availability =
90%
Disk A

Disk A Disk B

Availability = Availability = Disk B

Availability =
90% 90% 90%

Availability only then, if both are in Availability = 1 – not available

operation => AxB= 1 – both are not available =

0.9 * 0.9 = 0.81 or 81% 1 – (A not available) x (B not

available) =
1 – 0.1 * 0.1 = 0.99 or 99%
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Availability Management
Availability Measurement Example (3)

Example of availability in a parallel or a serial architecture

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Availability Management
Risk Management is also an aspect of availability

Assets Threats Weaknesses

Risk analysis Risks

Risk management

Management
Countermeasures Planning for of downtimes
possible downtimes

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Availability Management
Availability Reporting

Classical reporting measures

 % available
 % unavailable
 Duration of unavailability in hours
 Frequency of failure
 Impact of failure
Problems with classical measures:
– Fails to reflect IT availability as experienced by the business and users
– Conceal “hot spots”. Generally good availability for the IT organization
– Does not support continuous improvement

Future measured variables (CCTA acceptance):

 Impact by user minutes lost (user productivity)
 Impact by business transaction

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Availability Management
Benefits
 IT services with an availability requirement are designed, implemented, and
managed to consistently meet that target
 Improvement of capability of the IT infrastructure to attain the required levels of
availability to support the critical business processes
 Improvement of customer satisfaction and recognition that availability is the
prime IT deliverable
 Reduction in frequency and duration of incidents that impact IT availability
 Single point for availability is established within the IT organization (process
owner)
 Levels of IT availability provided are cost-justified and support SLAs fully
 Shortcomings in provision of availability are recognized and coped with in a
formal way
 Mindset moves from error correction to service enhancement: from reactive to
proactive attitude

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Availability Management
Risks

Potential problem areas:

 Costs of availability management are seen as overhead and are too high
 It is difficult to quantify the availability demands of the user and to determine
their costs
 Lack of available resources with the required skills
 Gathering of availability data requires many tools to underpin and support the
process
 Vendor dependency
 Broad knowledge of IT infrastructure

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Availability Management
Best Practices

 Separation of design and measurement

 Usage in connection with capacity, financial management for IT services,

and IT service continuity management

 Determination of metrics using this process

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Availability Management
Summary

 The goal of the Availability Management process is to optimize the capability of

the IT infrastructure, services, and supporting organization to deliver a cost-
effective and sustained level of availability that enables the business to satisfy
its business objectives.
 Aspects: Availability, Maintainability, Reliability, Serviceability
 Risk Management
 Measures of Availability:
– MTBSI (Mean Time Between System Incidents)
– MTTR (Mean Time To Repair )
– MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
– Calculation of Availability

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