Forrester Research on High Availability

Stephanie Balaouras, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, has an interesting blog post this week on ZDnet about the increasing interest in high availability from her clients. In her article “How Do We Measure High Availability?” she makes several key points:

• As companies become 24X7 “always on” operating environments, they are becoming more and more sensitive to application and system downtime.

• HA is no longer an all or nothing discussion about proprietary fault-tolerant systems or high-end clustering solutions. Today there are lower-cost alternatives that provide the required level of availability at a cost justified by the risk and cost of downtime.

• Developing and agreeing upon SLAs is the toughest part of HA planning, but these KPIs are good starting point toward metrics that matter to the business.

Earlier this year, we spoke with Stephanie about the topic of virtualization and high availability. You can read that Q&A here. For additional info on this topic, you can also download Forrester's recent white paper "X86 Server Virtualization For High Availability And Disaster Recovery."