Compaq ProLiant 6500 Deploying the ProLiant Cluster for NetWare 4.2 - Page 4

'HSOR\LQJ WKH 3UR/LDQW &OXVWHU IRU 1HW:DUH   Cost of Downtime The driving force behind the high-availability systems has been the elimination of costs associated with downtime. The cost of downtime formula must include several factors. Among these are: • Productivity loss • IM costs • Lost transactions • Customer or end user dissatisfaction Each factor is weighted differently, depending on the critical nature of each factor as it pertains to your business and to your specific application systems. For example, downtime during peak hours of a point-of-sale operation would have a much greater impact on customer satisfaction issues than downtime in an end-of-day email server backup operation. To understand the true cost of computer downtime in your business environment, you must examine the impact and contribution to increased costs of each factor as it applies to your business-critical applications. Benefits of Clustering With the causes enumerated and the costs understood, it is clear that the Novell High Availability Server can eliminate your concerns and ease your tightening networking budget through • Availability - Simply defined, availability is the measure of how well a computer system can continuously deliver services to clients. This is dependent upon the system's ability to prevent or recover from failures or faults. • Scalability - Clustering for scalability means increasing performance beyond that of a single computer node by adding more nodes to the cluster. Performance scalability across cluster nodes is difficult to achieve and requires not only scalable hardware, but also scalable software, for example, a parallel database. • Lower Total Cost of Ownership - By reducing downtime, you can eliminate both the high costs of administrative support and, at the same time, the lost revenue caused by downtime and customer dissatisfaction. Summary In general, clusters can provide both high availability and scalability for business-critical applications. In today's market, experts estimate that approximately 80-90% of clusters are used to take advantage of the increase in server availability created by clusters. The use of clusters to reduce computer system downtime has a direct impact on a company's revenue and the MIS department budget. The impact depends on your calculated costs of downtime. In most cases, the cost of installing and maintaining a cluster are likely to be offset by the reduction in downtime costs, and, as businesses' reliance on computer systems intensifies, the cost of downtime is likely to increase. 0096-0699-A