For a modern company, information means money. And today's rapidly developing computer technology has made companies depend more and more on computer systems to store and access the information that is crucial to the success of their daily operations. Thus constant availability of computer systems becomes essential to any company, and their expected or unexpected downtime can mean detrimental consequences.
Yet the advanced computer technology in both hardware and software still cannot eliminate the numerous unwelcome failure conditions and prevent unexpected downtime from taking place. In addition, all computer systems also require regular maintenance and normal upgrades, which means more undesirable, though expected, downtime.
There are three main availability systems to decrease such downtime.
1. Normal Availability System:
This is a normal computer system used for general purposes without any additional, special hardware component to handle a failure condition. It requires human intervention to manually identify and correct or repair a failure and restart the system before normal operation is resumed.
2. Fault Tolerance System:
A fault tolerance system consists of proprietary and tightly coupled duplicate systems. Its operating system contains fully integrated fault-handling ability. Such a system provides spontaneous and fully automatic responses to system failures and uninterrupted services. But it is very expensive.
3. High Availability System:
The success of a high availability system mostly relies on a managing software. This software is capable of detecting and correcting failure conditions in both the computer systems connected through additional hardware and the applications used on the network.
HATS HA (H.A. Technical Solutions High Availability) provides such a high availability system for Sun and Sun-compatible computer systems. It delivers a reliable solution for unwanted downtime at an affordable price. Its modifiable configuration can detect a failure condition within 5 seconds and can initiate a failover within 10 to 120 seconds.
Such speed becomes even more effective when used together with high-quality shared disks. Shared disks make it possible to connect multiple computer systems, and HATS HA takes advantage of that to achieve 99.99 % fault tolerant results.
Some companies try to simply rely on shared disks to solve their downtime problems. The following table shows a comparison of using shared disks with HATS HA and without it to let you see their incomparable differences and the many advantages provided by HATS HA.
| Compared Items | Shared Disk without HA | Shared Disk with HA |
|---|---|---|
| Power | When active server is on, standby server cannot be turned on. | Both active and standby servers can be on at the same time. |
| Human Intervention | Requires a person to start the standby server to take over the job. | HATS HA automatically fails an active job over to the standby server. |
| Client's Wait Time | The amount of time to start the standby server and the needed applications. | The amount of time to fail over a job automatically. |
| Conditions for Failover | Only when power fails. Unable to detect hardware component failure or an application software's unsuitability to continue working in the OS environment. | Detects failure conditions in both hadrware components and application softwares. |
| Way of Failing over | Has to fail over all the running applications at the same time, whether needed or not. | Can detect the failure condition in a specific application and fails over only that application. |
With its many powerful functions and admirable special features, HATS HA will always keep your information at your fingertips!
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