Survey looks into application availability

IT organizations know they need more reliable information systems, but 49 percent of them lack the budget for high availability technology, 40 percent don't understand what qualifies as high availability, and more than 80 percent can't quantify the cost of downtime to help make their case for bigger budgets, according to a recent survey by ITIC / Stratus Technologies.

The survey of 225 IT professionals asked 10 questions about their application availability needs, virtualization and service level agreement compliance. A summary of the results is as follows:

- Extreme availability results: One of the biggest surprises was the extreme results on the percentage of applications that require the highest level of availability. Approximately 16 percent of those polled said that 20 percent to 30 percent of their applications required the highest level of availability; 18 percent said that 50 percent to 60 percent of applications needed the highest level of availability, while 19 percent said that 80 percent of their applications required the highest level of availability. Overall, the percentages of companies that indicated their applications required the highest level of availability were higher on average than one might have expected.

- More applications demand high availability. Nearly four-fifths of the survey
Respondents - 81 percent - said that the number of applications needing very high availability has increased in the past two-to-three years. Another 17 percent said it “remained the same.”

- The level of uptime needed generated the most confusion among the respondents. 41 percent indicated that their most crucial applications only required Conventional 99.0 percent to 99.9 percent uptime; nearly a third of respondents -- 29 percent -- require 99.95 percent to 99.99 percent of uptime and 7 percent indicated their firms require continuous uptime.

- Another 16 percent of respondents reported that their companies had no specified availability levels. However, during the customer interviews many IT managers and VPs of IT, explained that their companies relied on their powers of observation.

- Integration and interoperability (60 percent) and cost (56 percent) are the two most important criteria when choosing to invest in an availability solution. Ease of use and installation was a close third and was chosen by 55 percent of the survey respondents. The option purchasing from a supplier on the approved vendor list was not a priority: only 3 percent said it mattered.

- Two out of 5 businesses – 40 percent -- said there’s no money in their budgets to purchase an incremental software availability solution, at present. However: 2 percent said they would pay $2,000 to $4,000; 8 percent said they would spend $4,000 to $5,000; 3 percent would spend $5,000 to $10,000 and 11 percent said they would spend $10,000 to $15,000 while a 5 percent were willing to spend “whatever it takes” to ensure application availability. The remaining 30 percent were “Unsure”.

- Over half – 52 percent - of firms said that virtualization technology has increased uptime and application availability. However, it is important to note that 18 percent of the respondents had not yet deployed virtualization. Among those who had deployed virtualization, the figure was significantly higher – 82 percent - said virtualization had improved application availability and uptime. Only 4 percent of respondents said virtualization had not yielded any improvements in application availability; 18 percent said availability remained the same and 8 percent were “Unsure”. ITIC anticipates these figures will change over the next 12 to 18 months as more corporations install virtualization solutions in their data centers.

- More than 2 out of 5 – 43 percent - of the corporate respondents indicated they do not track their company’s ability to meet SLAs and therefore cannot assess the impact in terms of cost or lost productivity on the organization. 28 percent of the respondents said they are able to assess the impact of downtime; just under 11 percent acknowledged they could not and another 18 percent were “Unsure”.

Read the full survey results (PDF)

•Date:2nd April 2009• Region: US/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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