ServerWise®Takes On The Challenge to Provide 24x365 Availability
Overview
Talk to the database administration group in any major corporation these days, and you'll experience an atmosphere of controlled chaos as DBAs and other advanced hosts scramble to address a variety of needs ranging from the design of new applications to keeping business-critical applications operational. As more businesses demand full-time system availability, and as the cost of downtime increases geometrically, the time available for optimizing performance on business-critical systems and software is shrinking.
On the other hand, if routine maintenance procedures are ignored, performance suffers. IS is forced to perform a delicate balancing act between the mandate for 24x365 availability and the consequences of deferred system maintenance. The stakes are high and IS is caught between seemingly contradictory objectives.
Factors That Make Continuous Availability Difficult to Achieve
- Data growth and the shrinking maintenance window
- Decision support
- Data warehousing
- Full-time availability
- Growing IT complexity
- The effect of new parallel technologies
Data growth and the shrinking maintenance window
All growing businesses accumulate enormous amounts of data. According to GartnerGroup, the average database will grow tenfold in size between 1995 and 2000, while the largest database will reach one petabyte. At the same time, 24x365 availability of computerized information is becoming the requirement rather than the exception. IS has to be increasingly creative to find time to perform routine system maintenance. High-transaction databases need periodic maintenance and reorganization. With constant use, databases become fragmented, data paths become inefficient and performance degrades. Data must be put back in an orderly sequence; the gaps created by deletions must be erased.
Decision support
More and more companies are finding new ways to use core business data for decision support. For example, credit card companies maintain a basic body of information that they use to list purchases and prepare monthly statements. This same information can be used to analyze consumer spending patterns and design promotions that target specific demographic groups and, ultimately, individual consumers. This means that core business data must be replicated across multiple database environments and made available to users in user-friendly formats. Therefore, the availability of operational data can be negatively affected by the requirements of decision support users, since large amounts of second-hand data are not available for update processing during bulk data unload.
Data warehousing
Just as decision support has expanded the use of operational data, data warehousing has driven overall growth by replicating data for use by specific departments or business units. One of the major sources of operational data online today is the dynamic database-driven customer accounts, affiliate networks and a slew of various business critical data. According to META Group, 87% of respondents in a data warehousing survey said that availability and speed of deployment for data warehousing is the number one reason why businesses and individuals drop one host to find another–as reliability and speed become more important.
The unloading and loading of external data to operational data stores, and then on to data marts, has increased the number of utility functions that must be administered. The time taken to propagate data has conversely affected the overall availability window of both the data sources and data targets during the unload and load processing. The growth of data warehouses will continue into the millennium, fed by the informational needs of knowledge workers and the falling cost of storage media.
Full-time availability
Just when the latest hardware and software technologies have finally brought 24x365 availability within reach, the mandates of the global economy have forced IT departments to reevaluate the situation. Now the buzz phrase is 24x24 availability, as businesses conduct operations in all time zones and data must be available to a new spectrum of users, not all of whom work in the same time zone as the operational server.
Airline reservation systems, credit card approval functions, telephone company applications–all must be up and running all day, every day. International finance is among the best examples of the need for full-time availability. Money never sleeps and the daily flow of Deutsche marks, dollars, pounds and yen goes on with the inevitability of the lunar orbit. So does the global information exchange on which brokers base their buy-and-sell decisions. Billions are on the line each minute and downtime is simply not optional. IT decision makers need that guarantee of a solid company chosen to provide the online backend and power–ServerWise has supplied this 100% uptime guarantee.
Growing IT complexity
As with any single-vendor system, the world of the IBM® mainframe is clean, precise and predictable. But today, it is hard to find a company of any size that has not at least considered moving some of its basic business functions off mainframes onto client/server systems such as DB2 for AIX and OS/2. As these heterogeneous systems encroach on the mainframe world, IT staffs have to find ways to accommodate the former into the overall IT environment. This is rarely the seamless process portrayed by the mid-range computer makers.
Complexity stems from human factors as well. Downsizing has forced former specialists to become generalists. As a result, tasks such as database reorganization–that used to be simple and straightforward for data management experts–are now complex and lengthy for generalists. Of course, IT is not immune to corporate downsizing; there are now fewer personnel to handle day-to-day computer and online issues than there were just a few years ago. Finally, mergers and acquisitions force IT staffs to consolidate incompatible systems and data structures.
The effect of new parallel technologies
IBM's Sysplex multiprocessor line splits tasks among parallel processors, eliminating some processor availability limitations. Individually, the processors are less powerful than bipolar predecessors, but combined they crunch data faster by assigning work to open processors rather than requiring users to wait for cycles on a single processor. Unfortunately, standard bipolar maintenance software does not run very efficiently on the newer systems. To reorganize databases and handle backup and recovery functions for parallel processing environments, IT departments need maintenance utilities written specifically to take advantage of parallel processors.
The Challenge: Toward the Goal of 24x365 Availability
Having established that life is challenging for today's IT managers and professional web hosts, the following section contains pointers on alleviating some of the problems and realizing the objective of 24x365 availability. Faced with shrinking budgets and resources, and an ever-increasing volume of data to manage, all must evaluate its critical needs and implement a series of key strategic steps. Among them:
- Perform routine maintenance while systems are up
- Automate backup and recovery functions
- Exploit parallel processing technology
Perform routine maintenance while systems are up
To address the need for performance optimization while trying to get the most out of smaller IT staffs and budgets, products that simplify and automate maintenance functions are key. ServerWise utilizes tools that reduce maintenance time from hours to minutes or require no maintenance time at all, while allowing users continued access to absolutely all angles of their account and site. A few tools exist that perform these functions without taking systems offline, but ServerWIse has gone one step farther by making these capabilities a requirement.
Automate backup and recovery functions
To ensure that a company can get its data and site back as quickly as possible after an outage or disaster, preplanning is necessary. Taking a proactive approach to backup and recovery management can mean the difference between a minimal outage with no data loss and a situation from which a business can never recover and from which a host can instantly suffer considerably losses. Few software products assist in managing the backup strategy, nor do they provide functions that enable proactive recovery planning. ServerWise utilizes a suite of products that allow for frequent backups that exert minimal impact on the online system and provides extremely fast recovery of data in a sequence directly related to the criticality of the business application the data supports, as well as products that assist in automating the recovery in a crisis situation.
Exploit parallel processing technology
New parallel technology reduces overall computing costs. To realize the rewards, however, a host needs tools that exploit parallel processing. Otherwise, parallel technology benefits will be negated by products that run slowly and inefficiently because they were built for a different hardware environment.
The ServerWise Solution: Nondisruptive Utilities
ServerWise has matured over the years from a small web design and consulting firm to a large e-services all-inclusive company.
The definition of a nondisruptive utility is to provide both update and read access to a database during execution of the utility. Additional considerations for nondisruptive utilities are the number and types of resources needed to perform nondisruptive operations. Historically, the native IBM DB2 utilities have used considerably more CPU and I/O resources than ISV utility solutions.
Areas where nondisruptive utilities are needed most
- Database reorganization for maintaining performance
- Database backup, to ensure data is available for recovery in the event of application or hardware failure, in addition to disaster recovery preparedness
- Unloading and loading of source data and operational data stores for decision support systems and data warehouses
- Checking for both referential and structural data integrity
- E-commerce processing power
As the architecture of the entire hosting industry evolves to improve in both products and services as well as support, the importance of guaranteed absolute availability will grow. Many web hosts currently rely on buffers, which could have a negative impact on transaction performance due to contention. The best solution provides site and data integrity, along with high performance and nondisruptive operation by fusing each solution together into a brilliant package to fit business, corporate and personal web hosting needs.
Conclusion
Organizations have to find a balance between the seemingly incompatible needs for 24x365 uptime and periodic maintenance. A poorly maintained server network is a business inhibitor and will be nearly impossible to restore in the event of a crisis. There are alternatives to the native utilities that perform routine maintenance and backup functions while providing continuous availability of the system network and associated applications. In many instances, critical applications directly affect revenue. Thus, ServerWise has implemented a maintenance and backup strategy that provides optimum availability.
Prudent practices and 24x365 availability need not be mutually exclusive. It just takes the right tools and a little planning as well as a ServerWise Hosting Account.
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