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Monday, October 22, 2012

Making application high availability the least of your worries

Ensuring application high availability (HA) is in your best interest, but only if you have the right solution to do the needful. Otherwise, HA can pose a serious problem, increasing your chances of lagging behind, and providing competitors with an opportunity to do better. However, it is possible to avoid any situation, if you are careful when making the choice and avoid finalizing the first solution, at least not before you have ascertained its viability. Anyways, firstly you must ensure that the solution is fit for the environment you work in; therefore, differentiating between Linux and Windows environments is more or less inevitable.

As soon as you are sure of the environment for which you actually require the solution, you can try and ask for evaluation software, if at all it is available. For this, you may have to be specific and convey that it is application high availability that is on your mind, in order to ensure that only the relevant solution is given to you. Of course, in addition to requesting the evaluation software, you must also ensure that the solution has all or most of the desired characteristics and can come in handy when you are having trouble with HA.

For example, no matter how good the solution is, if it requires you to invest in expensive hardware, you may not want to opt for it especially if with your budgetary constraints, it is not possible for you extend HA to applications in an uneconomical manner. Likewise, you may or may not have experts working for you and can therefore face difficulty in making the most of any solution, especially a complex one. Therefore, looking for a solution that brings in easiness is your only option unless you are sure that complexity will not make the matters worse for you.

Meanwhile, all efforts made to ensure HA, scouring a feasible solution being one of them, can go in vain if you are yet to think about disaster recovery. Therefore, as soon as availability is dealt with, you should start looking for disaster recovery software or may be something that combines the two. Though you can always find out what’s best for your business, wizard-based software is likely to the serve the purpose most of the times. At the same time, if the software not only supports recovery at the basic level, i.e. within LAN's, but also extends its scope to virtualized environments, you are making the right decision.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Choosing between data center solutions without difficulty

It is more or less undeniable that when choosing between data center solutions, you are likely to opt for the one that has a sustainable design. Perhaps you may want to go a step further and specifically choose the solution that has either already been awarded with LEED Certification or has the possibility of receiving in the days to come. However, a sustainable design may point you in the right direction but it cannot help you in making the right choice and you have to look for other important points including scalability. And while determine the extent of scalability, you must keep in mind that your business is likely to grow in terms of its size. 

Furthermore, you have to dig deeper and find out if your increasing requirements of power and cooling can be satiated by the infrastructure. It is only after you have assessed these points that you will be able to determine whether or not scalability is there in the first place. Nevertheless, there is a reason because of which you should shift your focus to scalability and ensure that it is there under all circumstances. Interestingly, if scalability is missing from the picture, you can simply forget about TCO savings, which you would have typically expected from all good data center solutions.

Amid too many solutions, you are always advised to go for the one that brings in volume pricing and is ready to pass on the benefits reaped because of low market operational costs. As a matter of fact, these low costs, if passed on to you, can help you in saving lots of dollars as far as the data center lease is concerned. Therefore, it is rather imperative that you emphasize on scalability as well as low operational costs, thereby ensuring that the solutions do not turn out to be an expensive affair.

In the meantime, if you have already crosschecked scalability, you now require looking for flexibility in order to ensure that the process of choosing between solutions becomes a lot easier. For this, you need to find out if you are being made to sacrifice in terms of cost and efficiency just because you have been looking for a specific product size that brings along inherent scalability. At the time, as long as possible, you should stay away from gigantic multi-tenant architectures as these are likely to pose several challenges, thereby affecting flexibility, or rather eliminating it.