Compaq ProLiant 1000 Architecting and Deploying High-Availability Solutions - Page 4

Architecting and Deploying High-Availability Solutions 4 Many of our customers find it more cost-effective to engage Compaq for architectural and deployment activities. 1. What is the Cost of Downtime? You need your Information System to survive in a world fraught with risk. A world where off-chance and down-right failure can bring your operations grinding to a halt. What happens to your organization when the system goes down? The range of answers runs from "inconvenient" to "catastrophic." If your answer is closer to "catastrophic" than to "inconvenient" then you should read on. If your answer is closer to "inconvenient" then perhaps you should read on to see if things are really as rosy as they seem. In fact, most organizations underestimate -- or have not calculated -- the impact of downtime on their business. The Gartner Group (1998) studied downtime costs for a variety of industries. The table below summarizes the findings. Industry Financial Financial Media Retail Retail Transportation Application Brokerage Operations Credit Card Sales Pay-per-View Home Shopping (TV) Catalog Sales Airline Reservations Average Cost per Hour of Downtime $6,500,000 $2,600,000 $1,150,000 $ 113,000 $ 90,000 $ 89,500 In order to measure the impact of downtime, let's ask a basic question that helps quantify the level of availability you might need. Who and what gets hurt when a system goes down? Processes: Vital business processes may be interrupted, lost, corrupted, or even changed. Such processes might include order management, inventory management, financial reporting, transactions, manufacturing, human resources, life-sustaining medical systems, extended 911 identification, ATM operations, and more. Programs: Both long- and short-term revenue can be affected. Key employee or customer activities might be missed or lost. Business itself: In this age of electronic commerce, if prospects or customers can't access your site, chances are they'll never come back. And the chances are good that they'll end up with your competitor. Customers lost forever! People: Lives can be lost; employee benefits missed with adverse impact on morale; governmental program problems might harm citizenry; and even battles can be adversely affected if vital information is lost, corrupted, or late. Projects: Hundreds of thousands of person-hours of work can be lost, deadlines can be missed, changeorders might be skipped with devastating results. Operations: Those who manage the daily activities of an organization may find themselves without needed data, with lost information, with standard activities lost, or with key reports missing or corrupted. ECG064/1198