Zero-downtime system migrations

By Duncan Harvey, GoldenGate Software.

In these uncertain times, businesses are becoming intensely focused on two commercial priorities; retaining customers and maintaining financial controls. To thrive and survive the current economic climate, excellent customer service, brand differentiation, and operational efficiency are no longer aspirational ‘nice to haves’ but hardcore business imperatives. And achieving these goals is dependent on one thing — the zero-downtime of business critical systems and applications.

In today’s ‘always-on’ multi-channel business climate, system downtime has become unacceptable. Globalization and the Internet has created a 24x7 world where products and services are increasingly only available online, customer service expectations are high, and loyalty is fickle. The proliferation of online shopping, customer call centres, online travel reservations and banking mean business reputations now stand or fall against service levels in an instant. The continuous operation of critical systems, maintaining the continuous availability of applications and their underlying databases, is paramount to maintaining operational excellence and market leadership.

Counting the cost
Unplanned outage represents significant tangible cost to a business. Research undertaken by the Warwick Business School in 2008 highlights the growing dependency of many UK business sectors on IT infrastructures. The research revealed that retail is particularly at risk, with a probable downtime cost of over £350,000 per hour – with considerably higher stakes for global online players like Google or Amazon — compared to finance which faces downtime costs of over £100,000 per hour. For example, online retail brands like Amazon realize the impact of one hour’s downtime can mean the loss of planned and impulse purchases, loss of traffic from affiliates which opens the door for a customer to buy from the next closest competitor, all spurred on by service non-availability.

Who dares wins
Regardless of the current downturn, organizations need to migrate to new technologies or hardware platforms or upgrade existing environments in order to benefit from improved performance and overall functionality. Investment to maintain competitive leadership and guarantee exemplary customer service makes good business sense, but often only if zero or very little system downtime can be assured during a major migration project.

The ‘big bang’ method of rolling out new systems – often implemented over the weekend in the hope that everything will be resolved by Monday – exposes companies to considerable risk. But for organizations that need systems to be available and operational 24x7, such as a billing application in the telecommunications sector, planned downtime is simply not an option. The challenge is to de-risk the migration process for business critical systems and — even if migration is not on the horizon — mitigate against the impact of an unplanned outage for continuous business operations.

Achieving zero-downtime
For many organizations, the focus is to deploy an interruption-free solution that runs old and new systems in parallel – if one system goes down, the other takes the full processing load. The bi-directional real-time movement of transactional data across two or more database instances allows organizations to increase availability SLAs and achieve this at a lower overall cost because all systems are active and available for processing. Even in complex and highly customised application environments, outages can be limited to the minutes or sometimes seconds required for application switchover to a synchronized, fully operational instance of the database.

The bi-directional data movement in a dual-active database environment can also allow for phased migrations where users are pointed to either system (since both are live) and can be slowly migrated over to the new system once the new system is fully operational. Ultimately, as long as the user can access the data continuously and it is fully ‘intact’, it should be business as usual with the job of the IT team being fully transparent. Additionally, dual-active systems are well-architected for the spikes experienced during high volume transactional data processing and in this way the organization can more easily scale to meet future growth.

Today’s increasingly savvy customers want convenience and quality service, regardless of when, where or how they interact with an organization. In these challenging times, failure to deliver against these expectations will be capitalized upon by the competition. When the focus is on retaining customers and building loyalty, delivering zero or near-zero downtime - especially during migration projects - is now a business imperative.

Author: Duncan Harvey, Director of Business Development EMEA, GoldenGate Software Inc. Duncan is a software and services professional with a background steeped in business generation and relationship management, complemented by a strong technical delivery background gained from development and support roles. Since joining GoldenGate from Oracle UK in 2007, Harvey has been responsible for creating and developing opportunities to deliver mutual sales success through GoldenGate’s relationships with global ISV’s and solution providers (including Oracle, HP, Teradata and others) focused on the EMEA territory. http://www.goldengate.com/

•Date: 27th May 2009• Region:UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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