|
Read the Digest in PDF.
You need the free Adobe
Reader.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
In this issue:
Migrating IBM Power Systems to HPE 911 Systems
Are Failing Too Often Pathway – NonStop’s Application Environment
Browse through our useful links. See our article archive for complete articles. Sign up for your free subscription. Visit our Continuous Availability Forum. Check out our seminars. Check out our writing services. Check out our consulting services. |
When Cost Trumps Reliability In my years of involvement with mission-critical systems, I see
organizations time and again choosing to save money rather than ensuring that
their mission-critical systems are always available. They prefer to rely on
faith and hope rather than a solid system
architecture. This short-sighted approach often leads to far more expensive
outages or even regulatory actions or lawsuits. An excellent example is the approach to 911 systems by many
communities, as discussed in our article “911 Systems Are Failing Too Often.”
911 is the nationwide U.S. emergency number that will get a caller immediate
emergency assistance. If the 911 system is down, property may be damaged or
lives may be lost. Nothing can be more mission-critical. However, 911 systems fail at an alarming rate. Some of these failures
are caused by equipment outages. Others are caused by calls not being
rerouted to backup facilities when a primary call center goes down. Why are communities
not investing in highly available call systems such as active/active systems
or NonStop systems (there are several of both installed)? Why are call
rerouting procedures not periodically tested? Every community should review
their 911 systems and ensure their capabilities adequately serve the people
and property they are meant to protect. Dr. Bill Highleyman, Managing Editor |
|||||
|
Migrating IBM Power Systems to HPE Open Systems
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has over three
decades of experience migrating many types of
complex workloads. Through its diverse know-how in delivering successful
migrations, including IBM Power Systems, to open-standard platforms, HPE has
learned what it takes to implement a successful migration and how to manage
the inherent risks. HPE employs established processes and
unique tools for IBM Power System migrations to open systems. It has developed
proven approaches to maximize the ability of the target environment to
deliver better results for the line of business while reducing costs. HPE has
demonstrated that the vast majority of such migrations result in a
significantly less expensive operating environment – often by a factor
exceeding 50%. At the same time, the new HPE open environments match or
exceed the performance and availability attributes of the original Power
Systems. By migrating Power Systems to open systems,
HPE also has positioned IT for the cloud as well as bringing greater agility
to the original applications. --more--
911
Systems Are Failing Too Often
It should be obvious without saying that
U.S. 911 services are among the most mission-critical of all computer applications.
“911” is the nationwide U.S. emergency number that will immediately get the
caller to assistance. If a 911 service fails, lives and property are put at
risk. A crisis call for an ambulance, to police, or to a fire department may
go unanswered or be seriously delayed. Yet a simple Google search of “911
failures” yields pages of references to 911 system failures across the
country. In some cases, the failure is the result of inadequate backup
systems. In others, it is a consequence of the failure of an otherwise
adequate backup system. In a preponderance of cases, the failure results from
the inability to reroute emergency calls from a failed emergency response
center to a backup center. In this article, we describe some of the
recent 911 system failures. Cyber Security and
Downtime
The threat of cyber
attacks is relatively new and was unheard of in the mainframe days of the
1970s and 1980s. It is here today and is rapidly on the increase, both
numerically and with respect to damage potential and intensity. Traditional
thinking says that a cyber attack, although a
nuisance, does not constitute an outage - a nuisance, yes, but not an outage.
This is not borne out by experience, and there are numerous papers that have
been published describing outages caused by cyber attacks.
The papers include a report to the IT advisory committee of the President of
the United States. One of the papers indicated a 20-fold increase in cyber attacks between 1995 and 2005 (in the thousands),
so you can imagine the numbers today. Targets for these attacks cover a wide
spectrum and include: - personal: your PC/tablet and mine. - social media, such as dating sites, with a view to
extortion or blackmail. Twitter has suffered from multiple attacks. - finance systems
with a view to obtaining money in some way. - military and other government sites for espionage or
sabotage purposes. Cyber attacks will almost
certainly cause outages of variable durations and that cannot be forecast.
Pathway – HPE
NonStop’s Application Environment
At a recent fault-tolerant symposium, I
presented an overview of HPE NonStop systems. I stressed the immense
scalability of these systems as well as their abilities to survive any single
fault (and in some cases, multiple faults). I was struck by the interest shown by the
audience in the NonStop process monitor, NonStop Pathway. I came to realize
that Pathway is the foundation for application fault tolerance, scalability,
and load balancing in NonStop systems. Pathway removes the concerns of these
important attributes from the application programmer and implements them
‘under-the-covers.’ In this article, we review the architecture
of NonStop systems and explain how Pathway provides applications with fault
tolerance, scalability, and load balancing with no effort on the part of the
application programmer.
@availabilitydig - The Twitter Feed of Outages
A challenge every issue for the Availability Digest is to determine which of the many availability topics out there win coveted status as Digest articles. We always regret not focusing our attention on the topics we bypass.
Now with our Twitter presence, we don’t have to feel guilty. This article highlights some of the @availabilitydig tweets that made headlines in recent days.
Sign up for your free subscription at https://availabilitydigest.com/signups.htm
Would You Like to Sign Up for the Free Digest by Fax?
Simply print out the following form, fill it in, and fax it to: Availability Digest +1 908 459 5543
|
||||||
|
The Availability Digest is published monthly. It may be distributed freely. Please pass it on to an associate. Managing Editor - Dr. Bill Highleyman editor@availabilitydigest.com. © 2016 Sombers Associates, Inc., and W. H. Highleyman |
||||||
