Stratus Technologies, Inc has revealed the results of its Highly Available and Fault-Tolerant Infrastructure Considerations Survey. Commissioned by Stratus and conducted by industry research firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), the study examined the viewpoints of more than 250 IT decision makers in North America and Western Europe on topics such as application downtime, recovery time objectives and use of virtualisation, high availability and fault tolerant availability systems.
The research revealed that the vast majority of production servers and services are not intended to tolerate the length of an average unplanned downtime incident, which was reported at 87 minutes. For organisations with critical business applications, each minute of unplanned downtime can have severe repercussions on the company, from lost revenue to not meeting service level agreements (SLAs) to brand reputation damage. This becomes even more concerning when 53 per cent of applications cannot handle more than 15 minutes of downtime, and yet 80 per cent of downtime incidents are reported to last more than 15 minutes.
Furthermore, 71 per cent of respondents admitted that their company is not tracking downtime with any quantified metric related to its cost to the company. This means the majority of companies do not know the cost of downtime until an incident actually occurs, but by that time it is too late to prepare. This exposure to risk is a continual concern to CIOs and COOs, and is a key reason why more IT decision makers are looking to implement fault-tolerant or high-availability systems. In fact, 38 per cent of respondents noted that they plan to increase the number of production platforms protected by always-on infrastructure in the next 24 months.
Jason Andersen, Vice President of Business Line Management at Stratus Technologies says: "Unplanned downtime continues to be a huge vulnerability in today's IT systems and alarmingly, the vast majority of companies are not even tracking downtime with a quantified measure of cost. This means these companies can't plan for how an unplanned downtime incident can affect their business until its damage is already done. High availability and fault-tolerant infrastructure is something we have seen definitively eliminate this risk from the equation. We believe that with the increasing adoption of edge based systems, including Industrial Internet of Things technologies, the costs and risks associated with downtime will continue to trend upward."
Key findings:
The vast majority of IT applications cannot tolerate the average downtime incident
IT decision makers do not know the cost of downtime until it is too late to prepare, but the cost is also causing more companies to consider fault-tolerant infrastructure
Ensuring application availability in a virtualised environment is still rife with challenges
Survey scope & demographics
For more information about the Highly Available and Fault-Tolerant Infrastructure Considerations Survey please visit www.stratus.com.
Stratus Technologies Systems Ltd
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