There’s No Upside to Downtime

By Asif Naseem, SA Forum

Service Availability implies a service is always there, regardless of whether parts of the hardware or software fail or the user makes a mistake. It is often taken for granted until an outage occurs. That is, we all simply assume that our cable TV, telephone, Internet, or wireless service will be there when we want to use it.

Downtime May Affects Millions
Last month, BlackBerry had two significant e-mail outages within a week, spurring media coverage and consumer complaints on sites like Twitter. During the second outage, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) estimated that all of its North American customers were affected. BlackBerry has approximately 32 million global subscribers. The outages also caused RIM stock to fall

Online banking is another area impacted by downtime. In October 2009, First National Bank experienced downtime on its online banking Website spanning several days. Some customers incurred fees for late payments. The bank offered to compensate those who could show they lost money because of the outage.

An even more dramatic example of the costs and risks associated with downtime is the case of the US FAA’s NADIN (National Aerospace Data Interchange) System. It tracks more than 1.5 million domestic flights per day. During three major service outages, flight delays of 2 to 6 hours were experienced around the country. Through a new program called Data Communication (DataCom), the FAA is currently working to address service availability problems and minimize if not eliminate such outages.

Similar examples exist in other industries as well, where the consequences of a glitch in service availability not only cause financial and productivity losses, but potentially human lives. Examples include emergency communications services, financial trading systems, and military communications systems.

Service Availability Benefits
By building applications that integrate with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms, carrier-grade (99.999%) service availability can be achieved, helping prevent problems. Manufacturers are now turning to COTS solutions based on SA Forum specifications to achieve five nines (99.999%) service availability, reduce time to market, and increase cost savings, as illustrated in several SA Forum COTS case studies.

The SA Forum continues to focus its efforts on producing specifications to address requirements of availability, reliability, and dependability for a broad range of applications. It is also providing educational resources on how to develop high-availability applications.

Dr. Asif Naseem is President of the Service Availability Forum. He is also the president and COO of GoAhead Software. You can reach him at anaseem@goahead.com.