Advantages of highly available systems

High availability can be configured to handle both hardware and software failures; the latter is the most common cause of downtime. Downtime is minimized by quickly restoring service when a system, a component, or an application fails.

To determine whether high availability is vital for your organization, you must consider the impact of a component failure or an overall system failure. Implementing high availability can give your organization the assurance of minimal downtime, and allows you to make potential savings when the cost of downtime is high.

User satisfaction can be adversely affected by frequent or long lasting system downtime. By implementing high availability for your environment, hardware and software services can be restored when a failure occurs, often in less than a minute.

Some solutions offer load balancing, which can also increase the performance of the system and provide scalability to your environment.

Support for unplanned outages

High availability is the ability of IT services to withstand all outages and continue providing processing capability, according to a predefined service level. Covered outages can include unplanned events, such as software failures, hardware failures, power failures, and disasters. High availability can be used effectively to mask unplanned outages from users.

High availability differs from continuous operations, which is an attribute of a system to continuously operate and mask planned outages from users. To have a complete continuously available system, you can implement both high availability and continuous operations. High availability removes all of the single points of failure in your product infrastructure.



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