For many companies that are considering IT changes this question often enters the discussion. Should we use cloud technology or a more hardware focused, on-prem or dedicated-infrastructure solution?
As with most things IT related, the answers are not always clear.
There are many advantages to cloud based infrastructure but, as we have seen with the recent AWS outage, (link to article), there are also many disadvantages to consider.
Businesses must evaluate the overall results they wish to achieve. Solutions that appear practical and cost effective out of the gate, can quickly turn into complex and never-ending projects with time consuming and costly outcomes.
The key is to not ask one question but ask many in order to truly understand what solution best fits with your business objectives and limitations thereby balancing the investment with your expectations or expected outcome.
Cloud Vs Not To Cloud
Any solution can appear ideal on the surface – the grass is always greener – but how does it look when we start to peel back, or more appropriately, add on the layers.
One of the first questions to ask is ‘Will it really fit with your current and projected business operations?’ This requires evaluating your existing IT structure to determine the scope of resources you may require.
- Integration with current software
- Knowledge and expertise requirements
- Security risks
- Hidden Costs (this is a big one)
- Physical limitations (Latency, Location – DC or network edge etc)
- Uptime requirements
- Downtime tolerance.
- Infrastructure controller
These key factors will help determine what improvements are needed to ensure your system is operating efficiently and is protected from potential down time. This risk mitigation can save you both money and time.
How Can High Availability Protect Your Business?
Intelligent Availability® is the emerging technology that is setting a new benchmark for reliability, availability and maintainability. It closes the gaps in traditional HA coverage.
Adopting the following three tenets of Intelligent Availability® will deliver “always on” predictable performance of hosted applications.
Self-Driving Infrastructure
Intelligent software proactively and autonomously identifies and mitigates risks.
- Eliminate Manual Intervention – no chance of human error
- Proactive Scanning – predict and proactively mitigate against hardware or environmental risks
- Simplify Administration – system works autonomously, freeing up IT team for more value added projects
Extended Stack Resiliency
Any component must be allowed to fail including all power, networking and environmental infrastructure.
- Complete Redundancy – top-to-bottom hardware redundancy plus 3 separate dual bonded networks. Storage is synchronously replicated across both nodes. Even power is redundant.
- Proper Provisioning – ensures peak platform performance and efficiency during normal and degraded hardware operation states.
- Compartmentalize foundational infrastructure (i.e. UPS, PDU and switch) – limits scope of outage in case of multi-component failure.
Endure and Survive Both Failure and Recovery
Intelligent Availability® system services continue nominal operation during recovery.
- Electrical and Mechanical Component Isolation – damaged components be removed and replaced all the while maintaining availability.
Contact Alteeve to learn more about how High Availability can maximize uptime and protect your business continuity.