Fault Tolerance
Hosting critical applications in a high availability environment helps to achieve the continuity and unscheduled downtime reduction goals.
These environments can be built using virtual systems over physical servers in High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Fault Tolerance configurations.
The chosen environment depends on the availability level goal, which is the result of an analysis enabling to know issues such as the maximum allowed recovery time (among others)
Fault tolerant servers
Fault tolerant servers provide an innovative way for the system to execute reliably, with no interruptions and with a lower cost in comparison to other options.
These servers offer the highest existing availability to protect critical mission applications when a 24/7 service level is required.
While traditional high availability solutions require recovery times that may become too long, fault tolerant servers operate in “lockstep” mode, thus ensuring a zero recovery time in case of hardware or applications failure.
These servers come equipped with double CPU/Memory/Hard disk and are ready to work under the most demanding workloads in Microsoft Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, as well as in virtual environments.
- Lower operation costs.
Fault tolerant servers are less expensive to operate than other solutions (such as clusters and RAIDs) because redundancies and configurations among components are included in the hardware, thus eliminating the need of configurations by software. - Requires only one software license.
Compared to a cluster, which require multiple application licenses, a fault tolerant server requiresonly one license for each application. There’s a relevant reduction in license costs, in installation and maintenance time and effort for the multiple instances of one application. - Less IT expertise.
Less IT expertise is required to deploy this kind of server, so special skills are no longer necessary to implement a high availability system. - Shorter downtime – less maintenance.
Due to a dramatically reduced unscheduled downtime, maintenance time is also reduced. The IT staff can focus on other critical areas.
Redundant systems: software, hardware and networks
System redundancy can be achieved by means of several software and hardware technologies which enable the highest availability levels at a lower cost than alternate, more complex solutions.
Some software tools keepn their applications executing and avoid downtimes, ensuring business continuity and data integrity.
These are some of the benefits associated to these solutions:
- They prevent downtimes and data losses, in local or different geographical locations.
- They simplify regulation compliance.
- They monitor applications and each system component, and allow immediate action; in case of failure they report by an alarm.
- They include a Disaster Recovery option, thus alowing the quickest possible system recovery.
- They work with standardized servers.
Service Terminals for Operational Stations
Architectures based on application servers and implemented by remote desktop (RDS) and Thin Clients are an approach to reduce costs and to increase IT security.
The tradicional implementation of architectures with multiple operational stations is made in distributed mode; however, its management is complex and expensive for a growing number of client stations. The use of technologies as remote desktop, in combination with a robust and secure hardware named Thin Client and a simplified, complete management tool for servers and clients, enables a significant maintenance cost reduction regarding energy, deployment and equipment update (servers and thin clients), among other benefits.
