What is Application Availability

Ensuring application availability means keeping your IT applications running and available to the end-users. It’s different from backup in that usually only the most recent version of your data is stored and if the system does go down, recovery must be in minutes or seconds.

Application availability solutions are complementary to backup solutions – they don’t replace each other.

Quick Recovery

Quick Recovery

Backup with Quick Recovery solutions are “scheduled” and typically use some kind of snapshot or disk imaging technology to quickly restore a server from a backup image.

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Fault Tolerant

Fault Tolerant

Fault Tolerant solutions enable a system to continue to work at a satisfactory level even when one or more components of the system fail.

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Replicationicon

Replication and High Availability

Replication and High Availability solutions are “real time” solutions able to capture all I/O and replicate it offsite. They can also manage the failover and failback when needed.

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What Systems need Protection?

IT Managers have a rough idea of what systems have to keep running or chaos will ensue. Commonly, email and ERP systems fall in this category.

An Application Impact Analysis (AIA) is a more detailed examination of the hard and soft dollar costs of system outage. From here you can calculate the RTO and RPO which will help determine what solution is best suited and justified in terms of cost.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

The basic question you are asking yourself here is, “how quickly must I be able to get my application back online after a disaster happens?”

The answer usually depends on the business impact the loss of that data has on your critical business functions.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

The basic question you are asking yourself here is, “how recent does the data on my backup server have to be?”

For some applications, like online banking, the answer may be milliseconds. For other applications, such as email, maybe a few minutes old is ok.