High availability computing

High availability is a characteristic of a system, which aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period.

Modernization has resulted in an increased reliance on these systems. For example, hospitals and data centers require high availability of their systems to perform routine daily activities. Availability refers to the ability of the user community to obtain a service or good, access the system, whether to submit new work, update or alter existing work, or collect the results of previous work. If a user cannot access the system, it is - from the users point of view - unavailable. Generally, the term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable.

There are three principles of systems design in reliability engineering which can help achieve high availability.

A distinction can be made between scheduled and unscheduled downtime. Typically, scheduled downtime is a result of maintenance that is disruptive to system operation and usually cannot be avoided with a currently installed system design. Scheduled downtime events might include patches to system software that require a reboot or system configuration changes that only take effect upon a reboot. In general, scheduled downtime is usually the result of some logical, management-initiated event. Unscheduled downtime events typically arise from some physical event, such as a hardware or software failure or environmental anomaly. Examples of unscheduled downtime events include power outages, failed CPU or RAM components (or possibly other failed hardware components), an over-temperature related shutdown, logically or physically severed network connections, security breaches, or various application, middleware, and operating system failures.

If users can be warned away from scheduled downtimes, then the distinction is useful. But if the requirement is for true high availability, then downtime is downtime whether or not it is scheduled.

Many computing sites exclude scheduled downtime from availability calculations, assuming that it has little or no impact upon the computing user community. By doing this, they can claim to have phenomenally high availability, which might give the illusion of continuous availability. Systems that exhibit truly continuous availability are comparatively rare and higher priced, and most have carefully implemented specialty designs that eliminate any single point of failure and allow online hardware, network, operating system, middleware, and application upgrades, patches, and replacements. For certain systems, scheduled downtime does not matter, for example system downtime at an office building after everybody has gone home for the night.

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