As a college student interning here at Stratus, I’ve been exposed to the world of downtime — something not a whole lot of college students can speak to.  As a typical college student with the four year undergrad tuition fees (a little more than $33,000 per year in my case), I’ll admit we don’t tend to think of the possibilities of downtime with our everyday necessities — Facebook, Twitter, or connection to our school’s network for example. We don’t think about the possibilities of not having instantaneous access to all of these things, until something does go down.

Well, I got to experience my very first real downtime event last week when my school’s server went down for nearly six hours. Just like any business network, our network is our lifeline at school. From doing research for our mid-term papers, to signing into Twitter, we’re constantly connected to the server. The reality is these incidents of downtime affect us as students in more ways than we’d like to think – or in some students’ case, more than they know about.

Let’s break down what happens when a server experiences unexpected downtime on a college campus by taking you through that dark day of downtime I experienced last week. It was a typical Tuesday just like any other. I was in my public relations class, reviewing that day’s lecture, when the professor attempted to click an external link within her PowerPoint presentation. She got an error message from her browser, and with a puzzled look on her face our professor closed the PowerPoint and attempted to reopen it to see if that would solve her problem:

ERROR! Cannot connect to the server.

We silently cheered to each other as the professor decided that due to the unexpected downtime she would call class early that day. We couldn’t have asked for it to play out any better…that was until our professor decided to tack on another additional writing response due next class to make up for the missed class time. Unable to decide if this downtime had been a good or bad thing I tried to stay productive and write a paper for another class in the library…

ERROR! Cannot connect to the server.

Again?!?! I was shut out of the research databases thanks to our servers’ downtime, and in frustration I left the library all together. Well this is perfect, I figured both incidents of downtime were a sign to use my afternoon to be unproductive for a-while and catch up on some Call of Duty…

ERROR! Cannot connect to the server

You have to be kidding me – a whole afternoon of any sort of productivity (recreational or educational) gone thanks to downtime.

I am just one student. In all, 2200 students and another few hundred faculty and staff were affected by the server downtime. Our productivity for that afternoon was completely shot.The school’s image was damaged from both inside and outside the campus. From angry phone calls made by parents whose students complained about the lack of connection, to the angry words from students across the campus – our IT department and the college struggled with the downtime. With tuition, room and board, and the other miscellaneous fees totaling over $43,000 per year it’s about time universities took the time and invested in preventing server downtime instead of wasting time and money trying to recover from it.

If a burglar broke into your home, you might be motivated to install a security system. The same goes for downtime. Every year, downtime robs companies of thousands, if not millions of dollars, and in this day and age, with more and more businesses moving to the cloud, the issue of downtime is becoming a bigger problem. This past Monday, the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency reported that since 2007, a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 large cloud service providers have caused an economic impact of more than $71.7 million.

Throughout the course of any given week, a wide variety of businesses are impacted by planned and unplanned downtime. While industry type may vary, the consequences do not.  It’s shocking to see how many businesses are robbed by downtime. Yet, they don’t seem to grasp the detrimental effects of an outage. Stratus has conducted surveys with ITIC that have found most businesses don’t adequately calculate the cost and affects that an outage will have on their business, whether it be qualitative or quantitative.

The following results from our latest survey illustrates why some businesses don’t know how much downtime actually steals from them:

• 29 percent of businesses don’t consider customer dissatisfaction as a contributing factor to their cost of IT downtime.
• 38 percent of businesses don’t factor in damage to their company’s reputation.
• 81 percent of businesses omit goods and materials lost from their cost of IT downtime calculations.

• 45  percent of businesses don’t consider lost sales in downtime cost.

It’s time to put a face to downtime so companies recognize why they need to take action. And speaking of action, I’ll leave you with this statistic: last year Stratus had an average of just 81 seconds of downtime across our installed base of 8,000 servers.

To learn more about how much downtime cost your business read our latest analyst report.

Introduced in the early 2000s, virtualization technology for x86 servers was initially used for software development and testing. By the end of 2005 virtualization was finding its way into production environments. Today, VMware, the leader in virtualization, categorizes this technology adoption as a three stage journey defined by an organization’s business goals and deployment strategies: IT production, business production, and IT as a Service (ITaaS). Each of these stages is further characterized by a primary business focus.

As IT organizations take this journey to move beyond simple server consolidation to virtualize Tier-1 applications and include cloud infrastructure designs in their IT strategies, the need for complete, bulletproof availability increases dramatically.

When VMware vSphere 5 virtualization is combined with fault-tolerant Stratus ftServer systems, you benefit from a strategic relationship focused on enabling critical applications. You can deploy virtualization in uptime-demanding environments with even more confidence.

Download the slides to learn more about Stratus_vSphere 5

Starting this month, we will begin featuring stories about our customers in the Customer Spotlight Series, a new section of the blog that showcases the diversity and results our customers are seeing. This month’s spotlight is on Rexam, one of the world’s top five consumer packaging companies. Rexam is a manufacturer of consumer packaging and beverage cans, serving a number of markets including the beverage, personal care, healthcare and food markets.

As consumers, we demand the most from companies in this fast-paced world. The same applies to manufacturers. Consider the supply chain for Rexam and their customers such as Anheuser-Busch and Coca Cola. If they experience instances of downtime that slow down their production, the domino effect runs through various areas of their operations and supply chain, including replenishment of materials, orders and invoices. If any one of those areas is affected by downtime, the end consumer, not to mention the rest of the organizations involved in the supply chain, will be affected and the aftermath can include missed production goals, cost overruns and a tarnished reputation.

According to a recent Stratus Technologies survey conducted in partnership with IndustryWeek, in the first quarter of 2012, approximately one in every three manufacturers have experienced downtime affecting one or more of their manufacturing applications. For manufacturing plants like Rexam, running at full-capacity, downtime isn’t acceptable for operations. Whether it is planned or unexpected downtime, Rexam realized downtime was hurting their bottom line and was adding overhead. 

With 99.999+ percent uptime and no need for plant-level support, the Stratus fault-tolerant, high-availability servers were the choice for them. The servers were also appealing to Rexam because from the view of an application, they looked like ordinary Windows servers. This was important to Rexam because one goal was to minimize the training involved with this implementation. Availability was also an important element to Rexam’s decision to select Stratus for their 17 manufacturing plants.

 After the pilot tests from a single plant signaled the system was delivering expected levels of availability, Rexam implemented Stratus’ high-availability fault-tolerant servers  in the remaining 16 North American plants. 

In this day and age, finding opportunities to take the data center offline is hard enough on operations, let alone bearing the stresses of unplanned downtime. Heading into the summer months, Rexam is happy to ensure the end-users get the most out of their leisurely downtime, and don’t have to sweat from stresses of IT downtime.

For more on Rexam’s story, check out the Rexam Case Study.

IndustryWeek readership poll indicates little current or future interest

Manufacturing plant operations may be virtualization technology’s final frontier. Fewer than one in five manufacturing companies currently run production applications such as SCADA, MES, Historian, Batch or OPC  in virtual environments, and only seven percent say they plan to do so in the next twelve months, according to a recent readership survey conducted by IndustryWeek magazine for Stratus Technologies.

Virtualization use in manufacturing IT systems is far behind the technology’s penetration in IT infrastructures generally, where one in five companies runs 80 percent of all applications on virtual machines, and one in two companies has virtualized 40 percent of all applications. ⁽¹⁾

More than 500 IndustryWeek readers responded to the “Manufacturer IT Applications Survey,” representing a broad range of company sizes and products produced. The magazine tabulated results by annual revenue categories – less than $100 million, $100-$999 million and above $1 billion – and by the average of all respondents. Results were as follows:

[1] International Data Corporation, “Worldwide Enterprise Server, 2012 Top Predictions,” January 2012        (IDC #232823)

Source: “Manufacturer IT Applications Study,” March 2012, IndustryWeek magazine

Pinellas County (FL) Utilities, which manages water and waste water systems for five million residents and annual visitors, made the jump to virtualization two years ago. “I can foresee a time when the SCADA operation runs entirely on virtual machines and three fault-tolerant servers,” said Ken Osborne, SCADA supervisor, about his current eight-server infrastructure. “That option didn’t exist a decade ago. Our decisions then proved to be the right ones in every regard and today we’re smarter about our virtualization strategy because of it.”

The full survey results were presented during a webinar hosted by IndustryWeek on May 31, 2012. Featured speakers included NetSuite’s GM of Manufacturing/Wholesale & Distribution, Roman Bukary, and Stratus’ Director of Global Alliances, Peter Cook, who offered insights into what manufacturers are currently experiencing with regard to downtime, as well as some best practices to prevent it.

Read the Full Press Release: Here