"After a phone tunnel fire affecting 130,000 businesses including Yell,
ICM’s efforts helped us to be up and running quickly with minimal disruption"
YELL
High Availabiltiy
In theory, every business would like the maximum amount of system availability possible, or 99.999% uptime. In practice however, the cost to implement a system capable of delivering this would be enormous, and your business may not even require such a high level of availability across all departments, hence this theory being known as the 'myth of the five 9s'. The myth is perpetuated when some businesses exclude planned downtime from their availability calculations. This is where it is necessary for a system to be taken offline for a period of time, to allow for scheduled maintenance, an upgrade, or software patch to be installed
In real terms, high availability equates to 99.9% availability of systems, which translates into 8.8 hours of planned downtime per year. In order to achieve this a significant investment is required in terms of consultation and infrastructure design and build, which includes purchase of new equipment and failover passive technology. Systems must also be monitored, protected with up to date security and data replication technology, to ensure no critical information is lost.
ICM delivers solutions that focus on the entire application environment, including data, operating systems, servers, the network and every application. In the event of a failure the equipment will switch over to secondary systems, delivering high availability in practice, not in theory.