Strategies for Achieving High Availability

Managing the availability of mission critical systems requires an understanding of the risks and costs of losing access to business critical information or services balanced against the cost of achieving a certain level of availability. That balance is shifting toward higher levels of availability as network services becomes essential to business continuity and the cost of downtime escalates. A February 2004 study by Infonetics Research revealed that interruptions in enterprise availability cost large companies an average of 3.6 percent of annual revenues. As a result, IT managers face growing pressure to drive network availability to unprecedented levels. At the same…