Hitachi High-Availability

Software Improves

Application Service Levels

An Overview of High-Availability (HA) Computing Software

It is increasingly important for a business to support continued access to global information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What’s more, careers often depend on the availability of service levels provided by IT to the enterprise.

In computer science, availability refers to the degree to which a system or resource is capable of performing its normal function. Availability is measured in terms of Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) divided by MTBF plus the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).

AVAILABILITY = MTBF / (MTBF+MTTR).

For example, a server which fails on average once every 5,000 hours and takes an average of two hours to diagnose, replace faulty components and reboot, would have an availability rating of 5,000/(5,000 + 2) = 99.96%. This would correspond to a Level 3 rating using the Scale of 9s.

Software products contribute to High-Availability Computing

Many factors can cause unplanned downtime. The Hitachi Freedom StorageLightning 9900has been designed to eliminate as many of these factors as possible in both hardware redundancy, on-line replaceable components, and software data copy functions to allow copies of data at other locations either locally or remotely so that processing can continue in the event of an outage.

Backup and restore procedures and products also contribute dramatically to computer system availability by reducing the time to restore operations in the event of an outage.

Hitachi has teamed with industry-leading storage management software providers such as Tantian Technologies® and VERITAS® Software of Mountain View, California to provide world-class high-availability solutions. These solutions contribute to the fact that customers and analysts alike regard Hitachi Freedom Storagesystems as having the highest availability in the industry.

The Lightning 9900has an Advanced Availability Profile compared to Competitive Products

The Lightning 9900was designed with maximum emphasis on high-availability computing for today’s most critical enterprises. Figure 21 highlights some of the many advantages in high-availability design that the Lightning 9900has over other enterprise storage products.

Active dual-ported disk drives instead of single-port drives or active/passive dual-ported drives.

Redundant active components throughout the system combined with automatic fail-over architecture.

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Availability refers to the degree to which a system or resource is capable of performing its normal function.

Customers and analysts alike regard Hitachi Freedom Storage systems as having the highest availability in the industry.

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Hitachi 9960, 9900 Series manual Hitachi High-Availability Software Improves, Application Service Levels