Ensuring High-Level System Availability of Computing Services

Abstract

Today number of institutes and their day-to-day activities are solely depended on IT. Almost every aspect of the institutional activity and services needs Internet connectivity and computing infrastructure to function. IT made the things faster, easier. At the same time, the responsibilities of implementer has increased multi-fold to ensure less downtime of applications and services. The cost of downtime is very high and may spoil the reputation of institution and its services. The best way to overcome the failure of the system or applications is setting up the high-level system availability. High-level system availability refers to a server or an application that ensures uninterrupted operational for a maximum possible time. In fact, a fault-free system or application that is expected to run without fail has to be well-designed and thoroughly tested before its deployment. Nowadays servers and underlying network have to manage a large volume of traffic to serve millions of clients. Perhaps, a single server may not sustain such a heavy load. In this computer era, it is very challenging task to achieve “100% Operational” or “never failing” of any computing environment. This can be achieved by implementing various redundancy mechanisms for hardware as well as software. Most of the organization prefers to deploy their applications on cloud so that the disaster recovery can be achieved with immediate effect without much complexity and safeguarding investments. High-level system availability can avoid having single point-of-failure. If failure occurs restoration can be performed in microseconds. This article attempts to give glimpses and technical highlights on achieving maximum uptime with minimal chances to failure of computing environment using presently available technologies.