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Friday, December 3rd, 2010 - 10:32 am EST
Real Redundancy is a Tenet of True Availability
I grew up in an old, two-family Victorian home just outside Boston, MA. My father, like many dads of the post-World War II generation, had a workshop in the basement. It worked out well because the house needed quite a bit of regular maintenance and repair. As a child, I found the vast array of gear and other paraphernalia in his workshop fascinating. There were tools for framing, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, surveying, automobiles, and … airplanes. (My father was an airplane mechanic in the Pacific during the war.) More interesting was that he seemed to have two of everything. “Why?” I asked. “In case one breaks,” he said. “That’s one of the constants of life.”
Fast forward four decades and my father’s comment comes back to me. I was hosting a webinar on the changing requirements of application availability. Contrary to most contemporary, live webinars, I try to answer all questions that are submitted. One question came from an employee of a competitive hardware vendor in fault tolerant computing. (I don’t keep competitors off of our webinars.) He was complaining that we were not paying sufficient attention to specialized hardware solutions for fault tolerance. It was intentional because, in my opinion, a single piece of hardware has a congenital risk of failure, regardless of whether or not redundancy is “built-in.” I’ve been involved with enough specialized hardware development to argue otherwise. Let’s now go back to the core issue.
The tools in my father’s workshop are like IT resources in any company: we rely on them to be productive and do things beyond our core competencies. But IT resources, just like tools, break. True availability and fault tolerance are built on physical redundancy. Fortunately, it’s now easier than ever, both economically and technologically, to have redundancy keep things going non-stop.
After the webinar, I did reach out to the person with the “one-box” issue, but he wasn’t interested in responding. Too bad because I think it’s time to start having the debate over what availability means. Remember, redundancy is important. Why? To quote my father: “In case one breaks. That’s one of the constants of life.”
Rob Ciampa
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