The costs of downtime continue to rise. One statistic claims that for nearly a quarter of survey respondents, the cost of server downtime was more than $300,000. That’s per hour, not per incident. Reports also show that almost every business, a full 90%, experiences unexpected downtime each year.
So the business imperative for taking steps to reduce downtime continues to grow. IT managers can use the high estimated costs and the high risk of downtime to invest in one or more of several technologies that can reduce the risk of experiencing an outage or reduce an outage’s length and its cost.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Hyperconverged infrastructure such as Nutanix combines storage and compute resources into an easy-to-manage system. High availability, replication, and resiliency are built into hyperconverged infrastructure, with automatic responses to node failures, drive failures, and network failures. As a result, using hyperconverged infrastructure in your data center reduces the risk of outages and impacts on operations teams and end users. It’s important to be aware, however, that hyperconverged infrastructure doesn’t offer protection against disasters, like a flood, that can take out your entire data center.
Cloud
For many businesses, using cloud is a good solution for avoiding downtime. Cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide high levels of built-in redundancy and support. Cloud offers a measure of protection against localized disasters. However, even cloud providers can experience outages. Some businesses choose a multi-cloud solution and rely on multiple cloud providers to ensure they always have a working environment. This introduces complexity and costs, however.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
Modern backup solutions like Veeam simplify the challenges of creating reliable backups that are easy to restore in today’s complex IT environments. Veeam can be used to backup physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud environments, including critical data in Microsoft Office 365. Encryption ensures your data is secure throughout the entire process. It integrates with Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solutions that enable rapid recovery when your primary site experiences issues.
Evaluating Your Uptime Options
Because every option for reducing downtime has costs, advantages, and disadvantages, it’s important to thoroughly understand your business’s uptime requirements to choose the solution that’s best for you. dcVAST offers professional services that help you analyze your needs and design a solution. We also provide managed Nutanix, managed AWS, and DRaaS services to ensure that whichever solution you use runs smoothly. Contact us to talk more about the costs of downtime and the best ways to minimize it.
