Introduction to Storage Networking
Business Needs
Availability
• Availability is a valuable asset in a market where
your competitor’s website is just a click away
• Many businesses now insist on “five 9s” availability
– 5 minutes of unplanned downtime a year
• IT’s focus has shifted from backup & recovery to
business continuity
Levels of availability:
Level Downtime per year
99% 3 days
99.7% 1 day
99.9% 8 hours
99.99% 1 hour
99.999% 5 minutes
Preventing failures is only part of the problem:
The demand for near total availability means that the system cannot be
taken down for scheduled maintenance, including upgrades and
backups.
When a failure does occur, recovery must be nearly instantaneous, with
no loss of data.
Over 2/3 of IT organizations in a recent survey indicated they either have
or are considering 24x7 operations.