Today, downtime means lost productivity, lost income and potentially lost customers. According to an Information Technology Intelligence Corp. (ITIC) survey, 98% of respondents say that a single hour of downtime costs the business over R1.3million.

Thankfully, technology has advanced to the point where zero downtime storage has become a reality, and organisations no longer need to tolerate any disruptions to their storage infrastructure.

Maintenance is essential, disruption is not

One of the major reasons for planned data storage downtime is usually maintenance of data and the storage infrastructure. Tasks include hardware maintenance and repairs, software upgrades and patches or bug fixes as well as application changes. The purpose of this is to improve performance and manageability of data storage.

Without essential maintenance, systems, and the applications they support, are put at risk and can fail, causing significant issues for business. However, while the need for maintenance remains, the need for downtime does not. Many storage providers now offer non-disruptive maintenance, which reduces a significant source of downtime.

Planned downtime – a thing of the past

Non-disruptive maintenance significantly reduces the need for planned downtime, but for tasks such as upgrades to hardware and software, as well as for database migrations, systems still frequently need to be taken offline.

Given the pace of business, this is simply no longer a viable option. Organisations need to have fully continuous data access and availability no matter what and 100% uptime is crucial to customer satisfaction. The good news is that it is possible to reduce and even eliminate operational downtime in the production environment. This includes software upgrades, hardware upgrades and replacements, and even complete storage environment upgrades and replacements.

End-to-end downtime elimination with zero risk

In order to ensure zero downtime is possible, storage architectures must support the ability for critical components to be taken out of commission without disruption or adding risk into the environment. While a dual level redundancy technically makes online hardware changes possible, there is a risk involved if the sole online system fails.

For effective, risk-free zero downtime, three-way redundancy is required. This enables full failover to be in place at all times, even if one system is taken offline, eliminating risk.

Storage providers that offer triple redundancy not only improve risk mitigation, they are also able to guarantee 100% data availability at all times. Even if an entire environment needs to be replaced, systems can stay online during the migration from one platform to another.

Everything from software updates to maintenance to entire platform refreshes can be performed with zero downtime.

When your data is the lifeblood of your organisation, and 100% uptime is critical, downtime is simply untenable. End-to-end elimination of downtime is possible, with the right storage architecture and support.

Organisations need to choose their partner with care to ensure they are able to support their business needs or risk facing the consequences.

By Hayden Sadler, Country Manager for South Africa at INFINIDAT.