Availability is a BIG Word We Need to be Concerned About

Availability like Trust is one of those BIG words that everyone can relate to.  For example when we think of trust, we can relate to sentiments like, “do I trust my bank”, “do I trust the government”, “do I trust my kids to make the right choices”, and even one government was so emboldened that they put a seal on their currency with the words “in God we Trust”.  Like I said, Trust is one of those big words in the English language that just about everybody can identify with.

And we in the IT business, well, we too are really concerned about trust.  Do our customers trust IT to protect their data, to protect their systems against outages, to maintain the confidentiality of our customers’ most private and sensitive data, and does management trust IT to protect their systems and avoid public embarrassment of a break-in or data breach.

Right on the heels of trust is availability.  Availability too is one of the BIG words that everyone can relate to.  Think about it, when we deposit a check in the bank, we want to know when our funds will be available, when will the plane be available for boarding, when will the restore be done so my data is available, when will my application be available, when will the website be available, and so on.

We in IT too often confuse the how and what, and maybe it’s the technocrat in us. We think of how do we make our systems resilient, how do we make restore faster, how do we make recovery faster, how do we make our operations more efficient, to “how can I save the organization money”.

But at the end of the day, it’s all about Availability. It’s the one BIG word that encompasses a lot of “whats” and for that matter, the “whens”, and nobody cares about the “how”, or the “who”; “why” because that’s what your customers expect; if you can’t, they loose trust in you and will go somewhere else for service.

For years, IT shops have struggled with making systems available and always-on. Similarly, we have long been dealing with the promise of open systems to drive down the cost. The promise of open systems was that going to commodity hardware would lower cost because of economies of scale and competition would keep prices in check.

And certainly the price of compute, storage, and network has come down dramatically. But at what cost? The cost has been sprawl, complexity, expectation, and providing resiliency at scale. And it is our job in IT to manage each of these.

As the cost of compute has come down so has our ability to convert manual processes into computerized ones, and as more processes become computerized, so too has the sprawl within the data centers. Thank goodness for virtualization to keep the number of hardware platforms in check.

And while hardware platform sprawl has been mitigated by virtualization, we still have the complexity of managing multiple server images and the expectations of IT’s customers.  Customers expect services to be available all of the time.

And when we couldn’t build out the infrastructure to make our systems highly available we browbeat IT customers into submission with a BIA or Business Impact Analysis.  The BIA was invented in the 90’s as a way to control cost and to limit access to precious commodities – high availability and disaster recovery.

A lot of organizations have shed the BIA, but it’s still in use in a lot of companies. At it’s heart, a BIA is a study of the impact of downtime is to the business. Typically a cost is associated for each hour of downtime. Then based on the value of the downtime, a decision is made whether to spend money to improve an application’s resiliency.

Over time the BIA has turned into a bureaucratic tool to limit resiliency, hence limiting sprawl and complexity. When confronted, many IT managers hide behind the BIA and say that an application’s value to a business doesn’t warrant the expense of improved availability.

Do we in IT really need to behave that way? Ever wonder why application owners are setting up shadow IT departments with other providers? To be relevant in the future, we in IT need to redefine how we do business and provide service to our customers.

So stop being bogged down by those that say you can’t.  Redefine your IT department, and redefine the way you do business even in your own department.  And bring back the innovation with Continuous Availability and Active/Active data centers.

It all starts with adopting a few new postures. First, look at how you can transform your infrastructure to provide continuous availability for all of your applications and services. And second look for ways to eliminate bureaucracy and moving to the self-service; the As-A-Service models are a major step in that direction.

One of the amazing things about continuous availability is that it can simultaneously reduce cost and complexity while improving availability. When is the last time you’ve seen technologies like that?

The fundamental underpinning of continuous availability is a concept called active/active data centers. When you adopt active/active technologies, you remove the barriers of where an application can run. Active/active allows an application to run just about anywhere.

In 2013, EMC commissioned the Vanson Bourne research group to conduct a worldwide study of Trusted IT. Continuous Availability was one of the main research areas. The study published in October of 2013 had some surprising results. (See www.emc.com/trustcurve for more details.)

Globally the Vanson Bourne study found the 24% of IT organizations are using active/active technologies and 52% are in the planning stages. And in 2014 the leaders in active/active spend will be India and China; in 2014, 71% of IT shops in India and 70% of IT shops in China are going to increase their spending on active/active. That’s right; China and India are leading the world in Active/Active investments.

And in the organizations studied in China, on average 12% of the applications in the IT shops were running in Continuous Availability mode.
So ask yourselves, what do the Chinese and Indians know that we don’t? I would posit that in our global economy and information systems they know as much as anyone. And perhaps being unshackled from legacy IT bureaucracy they can look to provide innovation based on the latest technology available.

Here are some other facts to digest.  Continuous Available application infrastructures can actually cost less that traditional application deployment models.  They do so by eliminating idle assets, which reduces cost and complexity.  In January, Forrester published a research paper on EMC’s model for continuous availability using VPLEX.  The research analyst, Reggie Lau determined that the cost of converting to a continuous availability model was paid for in 8.1 months with savings, and the return on investment over three years was 250%.

If you want to survive the wave of shadow IT and not find your customers giving up on internal IT departments and outsourcing to any other provider, it’s time to redefine the way IT conducts business.  I’ve written a white-paper on Continuous Availability for Applications over VPLEX.

The paper describes how virtually any application can be non-intrusively redeployed across active/active data centers along with the fundamentals of active/active.

So stop being bogged down by those that say you can’t. Redefine your IT department, and redefine the way you do business even in your own department. And bring back the innovation with Continuous Availability and Active/Active data centers. Forget about the “hows” or “can’ts” of the past. It’s all about Availability. Focus on how to provide Availability for applications and data and you will be the hero to your customers.