• Availability is a valuable asset in a market where your competitor’s website is just a click away
• Many businesses now insist on “five 9s” availability – 5 minutes of unplanned downtime a year
• IT’s focus has shifted from backup & recovery to business continuity
Levels of availability: Level Downtime per year 99% 3 days 99.7% 1 day 99.9% 8 hours 99.99% 99.999%
1 hour 5 minutes
Preventing failures is only part of the problem: The demand for near total availability means that the system cannot be taken down for scheduled maintenance, including upgrades and backups.
When a failure does occur, recovery must be nearly instantaneous, with no loss of data. Over 2/3 of IT organizations in a recent survey indicated they either have or are considering 24x7 operations.