Most integration infrastructure achieves high availability by clustering; in other words, the ability to share processing loads across multiple machines working together and utilize commercial failover management software.
According to Hub Vandervoort, CTO of SOA Infrastructure products, Progress Software: "Through clustering, these conventional, highly available integration infrastructures do recover from failure and restore service. However, the bad news is that there is often a gap between what the business expects and what this infrastructure actually delivers."
According to Progress Software, high availability is too often measured in terms of uptime. While uptime is important, what customers really care about most of all is how long systems will be unable to process transactions during any given failure. Guaranteeing uptime is hardest at the times when it is valued the most, because systems tend to fail more often during the heaviest volume peak periods. This is why maximum system recovery time is much more important than availability as a percentage.
Not only does high availability through simple clustering have the potential to fail to deliver the continuous and error-free service when the business needs it most, it introduces numerous hidden costs that are often not understood until after the infrastructure is purchased and deployed.
Vandervoort continued: "Unless an integration infrastructure provides 'continuous availability' - meaning that transaction processing continues uninterrupted despite system failure - infrastructure called 'highly available' is actually only 'mostly available.' Sure, we can make any system highly available if money is no object, but budgets are tight today. We wanted to critically examine and share some of the broadly held misconceptions of high-availability integration infrastructure so that organizations can take a serious look at the costs of downtime and ultimately achieve those continuously available systems at a lower cost."
The five dirty little secrets of highly available integration infrastructure are:
- The Myth of Five Nines: traditional measures of availability don't track what an enterprise's IT customers care about, namely, how long it will take to process their transactions when systems fail.
- Recovery time: conventional, highly available integration infrastructure actually interrupts transaction processing for 5-15 minutes when they recover from failure.
- Data corruption: conventional, highly available integration infrastructure may deliver transactions twice or in the wrong order when they recover from failure.
- Scheduled maintenance: conventional, highly available integration infrastructure needs to be brought down in order to upgrade hardware or software.
- Hidden cost and complexity: conventional, highly available integration infrastructure requires third-party products, application modifications and complicated operational procedures.
Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) provides application infrastructure software for the development, deployment, integration and management of business applications. Our goal is to maximize the benefits of information technology while minimizing its complexity and total cost of ownership. Progress can be reached at www.progress.com or +1-781-280-4000.
Progress is a registered trademark of Progress Software Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE: Progress Software Corporation
Progress Software
Lisa Coulouris, +1 781-280-4995
lcoulour@progress.com
or
LEWIS PR
Rich Young, +1 617-226-8842
progresssoftware@lewispr.com