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<h1 class="topictitle1">Availability concepts</h1>
<div><p>Before you can plan for the availability of your system, it is
important for you to understand some of the concepts associated with availability.</p>
<p>Businesses and their IT operations that support them must determine which
solutions and technologies will address their business needs. In the case
of business continuity requirements, the task is equally daunting. Detailed
business continuity requirements must be developed and documented, the solution
types identified, and the solution choices evaluated. This is a challenging
task due in part to the complexity of the problem. </p>
<p><em>Business continuity</em> is the capability of a business to withstand
outages, which are times when the system is unavailable, and to operate important
services normally and without interruption in accordance with predefined service-level
agreements. To achieve a given desired level of business continuity, a collection
of services, software, hardware, and procedures must be selected, described
in a documented plan, implemented, and practiced regularly. The business continuity
solution must address the data, the operational environment, the applications,
the application hosting environment, and the end-user interface. All must
be available to deliver a good, complete business continuity solution. Your
business continuity plan includes disaster recovery (DR) and high availability
(HA). </p>
<p>Disaster recovery (DR) provides a plan in the event of a complete outage
at the production site of your business, such as during a natural disaster.
DR may provide a set of resources, plans, services, and procedures used to
recover important applications and to resume normal operations from a remote
site. This <dfn class="term">Disaster Recovery Plan</dfn> includes a stated disaster
recovery goal (for example, resume operations within eight hours) and addresses
acceptable levels of degradation. </p>
<p>Another major aspect of business continuity goals for many customers is <dfn class="term">high
availability</dfn>, which is the ability to withstand all outages (planned,
unplanned, and disasters) and to provide continuous processing for all important
applications. The ultimate goal is for the outage time to be less than .001%
of total service time. The differences between high availability and disaster
recovery typically include more demanding recovery time objectives (seconds
to minutes) and more demanding recovery point objectives (zero end user disruption). </p>
<p>Availability is measured in terms of <dfn class="term">outages</dfn>, which are periods
of time when the system is not available to users. During a <dfn class="term"> planned
outage</dfn> (also called a scheduled outage), you deliberately make your
system unavailable to users. You might use a scheduled outage to run batch
work, back up your server, or apply fixes. </p>
<p>Your <dfn class="term">backup window</dfn> is the amount of time that your server
can be unavailable to users while you perform your backup operations. Your
backup window is a scheduled outage that usually occurs in the night or on
a weekend when your system has less traffic.</p>
<p>An <dfn class="term">unplanned outage</dfn> (also called an unscheduled outage) is
usually caused by a failure. You can recover from some unplanned outages (such
as disk failure, system failure, power failure, program failure, or human
error) if you have an adequate backup strategy. However, an unplanned outage
that causes a complete system loss, such as a tornado or fire, requires you
to have a detailed disaster recovery plan in place in order to recover.</p>
<p><img src="./delta.gif" alt="Start of change" />High availability solutions provide fully automated failover
to a backup system to ensure continuous operation for end users and applications.
These HA solutions must provide an immediate recovery point and ensure that
the time of recovery is faster than a non-HA solution. <img src="./deltaend.gif" alt="End of change" /></p>
<p>Unlike with disaster recovery, where entire systems experience an outage,
high availability solutions can be customized to individual critical
resources within a system, for example a specific application instance. On
the i5/OS™ system,
the high availability solution is based on cluster technology. You can use
i5/OS Clusters as a method to avoid the impacts of both planned and unplanned
outages. Even though you still have the outage of the server, the business
function will not be impacted by the outage. A <dfn class="term">cluster</dfn> is a
collection of interconnected complete systems used as a single, unified resource.
The cluster provides a coordinated, distributed process across the systems
to deliver the solution. This results in higher levels of availability, some
horizontal growth and simpler administration across the enterprise. For a
complete solution, you must address the operational environment, the application
hosting environment, application resilience, and the end-user interfaces in
addition to providing data resilience mechanisms. Clusters focus on all aspects
of the complete solution. The integrated cluster resource services enable
you to define a cluster of systems and the set of resources that should be
protected against outages. Cluster resource services detect outage conditions
and coordinate automatic movement of critical resources to a backup system.</p>
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<div class="parentlink"><strong>Parent topic:</strong> <a href="rzalwoverview.htm" title="In today's fast-paced Internet environment, it is crucial that your data and applications be available to you when you need them. If your customers cannot access your Web site because your system is down, they may go to your competitors instead.">Availability roadmap</a></div>
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