No interruptions

1 March, 2010

Ensuring that business and it operations are supplied without unplanned downtime is a critical success factor. The constant availability of systems and IT services is absolutely essential.

Recently, resilience has become elevated in importance as reliance upon data centres has increased. Without them, currency and stock exchanges can’t operate, online revenues are lost and a growing number of entertainment services are denied. The process of providing ongoing availability of services starts by making sure that the power supply is protected.

Business continuity and disaster recovery persist as major issues for all companies. It is dangerous to be complacent as any disruption to operations will have a negative impact and the ripples felt for a considerable time after.

When an outage stops services from being made available to customers and partners, trust and loyalty are jeopardised. Additional unexpected costs can also be incurred that can add up to a true commercial disaster. Businesses large and small therefore need to devise a strategy, based on contingency planning and the development of associated processes. Any potential impact to the business has to be calculated, with relevant protective measures put in place.

At the same time, organisational use of energy has come under the spotlight as the government has acted to reduce overall carbon emissions through the UK Energy Act 2008. Its CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme (formerly known as the Carbon Reduction Commitment) requires businesses with over 6000 MWh energy use on a half-hourly meter to benchmark and register with the scheme by April 2010. In terms of a data centre, this level of power consumption could be reached with just 40 or so equipment racks.

Electrical energy is the lifeblood of business. If the lights go out and the power supply is compromised, then commercial operations grind to a halt, and key data and even transactions could be lost unless appropriate measures are put in place. Deploying robust solutions to protect critical business assets from power outages, spikes, surges and brownouts is the foundation of any business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.

Problems with power
Demand for electricity is starting to outstrip the supply capacity of the power-generating companies. No power supplier can guarantee to deliver a consistent service at all times. There is no UK legislation in place to compel energy suppliers to deliver 100 per cent capacity at all times. In 2003 a power cut effectively brought rush-hour London to a standstill for several hours, affecting everything from traffic lights to rail networks. In the same summer, a fallen tree in the Alps deprived Italy of utility power.

According to energy business analysts Douglas-Westwood, the UK’s peak electricity demand could exceed available capacity by as early as 2017, due to the planned closure of nuclear and coal-fired power stations – and a potential short-term gap in replacement power generation solutions. The company’s December 2009 report, ‘The UK Power Generation Expenditure Forecast 2010-2030’, suggests that very large sums will have to be spent to ensure Britain’s lights stay on.

All of this emphasises the importance of installing uninterrupted power supply (UPS) equipment as a crucial first step. APC by Schneider Electric has developed a comprehensive approach to physical infrastructure to ensure the reliability and availability of key business systems, in particular for the data centre, its network, servers and storage resources. The company calls its solution InfraStruXure Architecture for on-demand data centres.

The goal of InfraStruXure is to guarantee resilience and adaptability at the core of a networked enterprise. This is achieved through the development of an innovative and modular approach which fully integrates power, cooling, rack, management, security and services. It can be configured for any IT environment, from a wiring closet to a mega data centre. The approach is superior to legacy data centre design and construction, where facilities are often equipped with an array of redundant units.

In addition to protecting sensitive systems from failure in the core electrical supply, InfraStruXure will also deliver a clean and consistent energy flow to business-critical equipment, levelling out any vagaries in supply. Heat removal is another key feature as data centre energy use can be considered as a single thermo-dynamic cycle, where a watt of power supplied means a watt of heat to be removed.

Business continuity
But UPS is only the first step in developing a comprehensive business continuity plan. Technology, costs and service provision continue to impact on business continuity management, which means the discipline must continue to evolve. A look at the ‘Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010’ presented by industry analysts Gartner (presented at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Orlando, Florida, October 2009), provides some indications of what might lie ahead.

Cloud computing (defined by Gartner as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using internet technologies) could grow as a model for delivering application, information or business process services. Delivering applications via the internet gives business a level of agility and resilience, despite the challenges set over the location of stored data. Cloud also provides an opportunity to reduce, or at least rearrange, some IT costs.

The reshaping of the data centre is predicted to reduce costs. Rather than building facilities to meet growth needs for 15 to 20 years, Gartner suggests costs can be substantially reduced by taking a pod-based approach to construction and expansion, building only what’s needed for the coming five to seven years. Virtualisation (a software implementation of a machine that executes programs like a real machine) will enable live migration, or the movement of a virtual machine from one physical host to another while continuously powered up, offering the potential to eliminate expensive, high-reliability or fault-tolerant facilities.

Without a visible and defined BCM plan, many organisations may find it harder to get appropriate future underwriting for the business. Either way, business continuity will remain a major issue for the foreseeable future. And any investment on this front must be seen as a cost of being in business. Without BCM and a disaster plan, there may not be a company to salvage if the worst does occur.