Friday, April 8, 2016

High availability in the data center refers to systems and components that are continuously operational for a long time. It typically means the systems have been thoroughly tested, are regularly maintained and have redundant components installed to ensure continuous operation.

Downtime can result from a power outage, equipment failure, natural disaster, human error, fire, flood or a wide range of other causes. It can lead to lost revenue, customers, productivity, equipment and brand loyalty.

Data center managers address reliability by implementing many measures, such as hiring and training the right staff members and developing, implementing and testing proven procedures. They also make sure the data center infrastructure has built-in redundancy and reliability—for power, network connectivity, fire detection, moisture detection, lightning protection, sophisticated monitoring systems, generator and UPS backup systems, fire-detection and fire-suppression systems, moisture-detection systems, and lightning protection.

To create higher levels of redundancy, for example, servers can be configure to switch responsibilities to a remote server when needed. This backup process is referred to as failover. Failover is a backup method that uses a secondary component to take over functioning whenever the primary component becomes unavailable. Secondary components can assume operation during scheduled maintenance or when an unexpected power outage occurs.

Failover techniques make systems more fault-tolerant and are necessary to ensure constant availability of mission-critical operations. When a primary component offloads tasks to a secondary component, the procedure is seamless to end users.

In addition to configuring failover components, high availability also involves good design factors. All aspects of data center infrastructure must be evaluated for durability, beginning with a thorough understanding of each component’s metrics as published by the manufacturer, including capacity limitations and life expectancy.

Reference: datacenterjournal.com

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