Another VMworld and another year closer to a software fault-tolerant product with SMP support? Fail!

In VMware’s defense, achieving full fault tolerance in software has always been a tough nut to crack. Sure, it can be done. But the end product is neither very useful nor efficient.

Enter Stratus ftServer, recognized by even VMware as the only full-function fault tolerant solution ready today for virtualizing Tier 1 applications. One ftServer – just one – delivers SMP support for critical virtual workload, maximizing the power and performance of every processor core.

While VMware has been struggling to deliver its second first-generation fault tolerant product, savvy IT managers have been using ftServer for virtualization for more than 8 years (the first one going back to 2004!). No performance-sapping overhead, no over provisioning, no configuration restrictions.

Check out the Stratus Uptime Meter, which shows uptime of the entire ftServer installed base around the world. Today it’s at 99.9999%. That’s just 31 seconds of average downtime. That’s not something you’ll be hearing from VMware about software FT anytime soon.

Learn more about how Stratus protects critical applications from downtime by downloading Virtualizing Tier 1 Applications: How to deliver superior quality of service and guaranteed uptime for business-critical VMware vSphere environments.

Hello from VMworld 2012. As expected, one of the hot topics at this year’s show is VMware Fault Tolerance. Here are my thoughts on Fault-Tolerant VMware prior to today’s VMware FT session.

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)

Why?

If someone told you your company could easily save tens of thousands of dollars every year, would you be interested in finding out how? It seems like a no brainer, but you might be surprised at the answer. According to an array of industry surveys, including one conducted by Stratus Technologies and ITIC, the majority of companies do not calculate the potential impact of IT downtime. Those that say they do may not be calculating it properly. The most recent Stratus-ITIC survey (December 2011) found that 52 percent of businesses do not know the potential financial impact of IT downtime to their organization. Personally, I’d estimate that this figure is actually very low as it’s been my experience that fewer than 10 percent of companies can assign a value – monetary or otherwise – to their cost of downtime.

Does knowing your cost of downtime really matter? Consider this: In February 2012, Aberdeen conducted an in-depth analysis of factors surrounding datacenter downtime. They found that compared to figures reported in June 2010, the average cost of an hour of downtime increased by 38 percent. The hourly cost of downtime for the average company is now estimated to be $181,770. Even for those classified as “best-in-class” companies – i.e. those performing in the top 20 percent, downtime still costs $101,600 an hour.

Ultimately, CTOs and CIOs who understand the impact of downtime on their organization and its deliverables are in a strong position to justify investment decisions and changes that can have a significant impact on their bottom line and help them achieve their service-level agreement commitments to clients.

How?

Our studies have shown that when trying to arrive at the impact of downtime, most companies typically consider only the most obvious direct costs and drastically underestimate the total costs associated with an outage. Arriving at a true accounting of the cost of downtime requires a more comprehensive analysis that should consider some of the factors listed below:

• Lost productivity/reduced production
• Goods and materials lost/disposal and cleanup costs
• Financial impact of customer dissatisfaction
• Contract penalties
• Compliance violations
• Negative effects on your reputation
• Upstream and downstream value-chain ripple effects
• IT recovery costs, meaning out-of-pocket expenses needed by the IT staff to restore the system
• Employee recovery cost, meaning the time it takes to get back up to speed once applications are back up and running
• Missed deadlines that result in employee overtime and priority shipping charges
• Potential litigation/loss of stock value

Here are a few real world scenarios that can help you see just how costly downtime can be:

1. A manufacturing company produces components for other third parties that are incorporated into their products. The server that controls the assembly line goes down and the line is disrupted, let’s say for an hour. In addition to the costs associated with reworking the goods that were not produced during the outage your promised delivery time has been completely thrown off schedule. The end result? Upset employees who have to remain at work until the job is completed. Overtime costs. Expedited shipping costs. And maybe most important: customers who may begin to question your credibility as a reliable supplier.

2. Your anniversary is coming up and you want to surprise your significant other with some flowers. You place the order 3 weeks in advance to be delivered at their workplace. On that day you are waiting for the ‘thank you’ call that never comes. As it turns out, the server at the flower shop went down and orders – including yours – weren’t fulfilled. While the florist has to refund the money associated with the unfulfilled orders, they have lost a customer they will never recover. In our socially networked world, you’re going to go out of your way to insure that everyone you can think of knows what happened and urge them not to order from this vendor.

3. While the cost of downtime is usually measured in financial terms, there is one case where the stakes are much higher – public safety. Here, server uptime can mean the difference between life and death for the person awaiting assistance. Similarly, responders can be placed in harm’s way when they arrive at the scene without information that can be crucial to the performance of their duties. Emergencies happen at all times of the day, so 24-hour uptime is especially important here.

Where does Stratus come in?

If businesses are unclear what IT downtime really costs, it’s unlikely they’re properly prepared to deal with it and its consequences.

Stratus has been protecting critical business applications against downtime and data loss for more than three decades. This is the only thing we do. We have the products, services and people focused on delivering uptime and reliability that are a cut above all the rest.

Learn more about the all of our uptime solutions.

When it comes to virtualization, most of the easy stuff has been done. Now IT wants to get more out of its investment. Business- and mission-critical applications are obvious targets. It’s not a question of can it be done, but whether can it be done safely.  The pain of downtime and data loss raises a caution flag.

That’s where Stratus and Virtualization for Dummies come in.  Despite the humorous title of the “Dummies” series, we’re very serious when it comes to helping industry professionals get up to speed on this very beneficial technology.

Virtualization technology is being widely applied today with excellent operational and financial results. In fact, it has become a matter of course for most businesses to work with some aspect of virtualization. Virtualization for Dummies provides you with a brief introduction to the subject, discusses cloud technology, and helps you understand the various options regarding availability. Knowing all this can help you create an action plan as you move forward with the next phase of your virtualization infrastructure.

Readers will learn:

• The basics of virtualization
• How organizations of all sizes can take advantage of virtualization
• How virtualization and cloud computing relate
• Why virtualization is as much for desktops as it is for servers
• How to ensure virtualized applications are always up and running
• The top ten things to consider when virtualizing business critical applications

Take your next steps in application virtualization by downloading Virtualization for Dummies.

India, one of the hottest economies in the world, became a victim to a massive power outage last week, effecting 620 million people. That’s the equivalent of the populations of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. And, all of Central America, too. Throw in Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. (Still not enough? Really?) Anyway, a lot of people.

Speculation as to the direct cause of the electrical grid flat line still stirs. While not the typical outage we reference, this two-day power outage is the perfect example of just how many critical industries can be affected by an outage. Hospitals in the dark, trains stopped, miners below ground and businesses shuttered across the region.

While some were lucky to be located in the western and southern parts of the country where the outage did not reach, others were prepared with backup generators that allowed operations to continue. Microsoft, Dell and Infosys operations in India were unaffected. Lucky for them!

An outage like this is not dissimilar to a cloud services outage. Many businesses in many places suddenly thrown into the dark, at least as far as IT operations go and the critical applications they support. Even on the scale of individual data centers, lives could be on the line if a 9-1-1 dispatch fails. If a major retailer’s online site is suddenly shuttered customers may go to shop elsewhere.

For right now, the consequences of this outage in India are not clearly quantified. In what ways do you think businesses and the Indian government were affected by this outage and what short and long-term affects do you think will plan into the final evaluation of this outage’s cost? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section.

We’ve taken some of the coverage of this outage and included below:

From PC Advisor: India’s Massive Blackout Tests Outsourcing Providers
While the southern city of Bangalore remains the unofficial capital of India’s IT outsourcing industry, most major providers have operations in the northern metropolis of Delhi, and nearby Noida is home to the Indian headquarters of HCL Technologies and CSC as well as a major IBM Global Services data center.

From Bloomberg: Worst India Outage Highlights 60 Years of Missed Targets
India’s worst-ever power crisis is the legacy of 60 years of missed investment targets and on current projections fixing the nation’s electricity supply is still decades away.
The network in Asia’s third-largest economy loses 27 percent of the power it carries through dissipation from wires and theft, while peak supply falls short of demand by an average of 9 percent, according to India’s Central Electricity Authority. Some 300 million people, or one in every four, remain without links to the grid and the number will still be about 150 million by 2030, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

From ChannelBiz: Technology Companies Claim They’re Unaffected by Indian Power Outage
Despite the huge power outages across most of Northern India, technology companies operating in the country have said that it is business as usual. However, resellers have hinted that all may not be well. The power outages are said to have affected 600 million people, as well as shutting down rail networks, lifts and electricity sources.

From CNN: India Hit by Second, Even Larger Power Outage
India suffered its second huge, crippling power failure in two days Tuesday, depriving as much as half of the vast and populous country, or up to 600 million people, of electricity and disrupting transport networks. The first power grid collapse, on Monday, was the country’s worst blackout in a decade. It affected seven states in northern India that are home to more than 350 million people.