Tuesday March 27, 2:00 pm Eastern Time Press Release

When Systems Stop: How It Could Affect You!

INTERNET WIRE -- Today promises to be Claire's best day ever. After a grueling series of interviews, she is about to get a plum job at a hugely successful company. There's just one more meeting, a mere formality, they told her. This morning's top news story is about a transformer explosion that cut power downtown last night. The outage outlasted most companies' backup power, and it's till not fixed. "No problem," Claire thinks, "I can skirt the blacked-out area."

It's a good thing she left early. The traffic computer is downtown and all of the lights reverted to an uncoordinated pattern when the system stopped. The streets are clogged.

Claire needs more gas to idle in this traffic. At the station, she tries to unlock the fuel pump by furiously waving the electronic passkey that FastFuelCo promoted so heavily. The pump flashes "Unable to authorize." FastFuelCo's downtown computer is out of service.

Asearch through Claire's purse fails to find any cash, and the ATM won't oblige because her bank's computer is also downtown and offline. She will just have to press her luck with the gas in the tank.

Finally, Claire's car sputters to a stop. She swears. Then she tries to let her interviewer know that she will be late, but, wouldn't you know it, the cell-phone company's switching computers are downtown. Ditto for the ones that switch the pay phone lines.

Claire never made it to the interview. And, it seems that it wasn't quite just a formality.

Claire and her ordeal are hypothetical, but they only begin to illustrate our total dependence on computer systems.

THEY'RE EVERYWHERE

Computers permeate our lives. Cashiers depend on them at checkout counters. Customer-service people use them to access product and account information. Couriers couldn't track deliveries without them. The list goes on and it keeps getting longer. Today, even a brief computer shutdown could seriously affect your daily life.

Computer outages are typically just major inconveniences for individuals. For businesses, however, particularly those operating primarily over the Internet, they may be catastrophic. For example, the cost of each hour of downtime can run to well over $6 million for an online stock brokerage, according to CONTINGENCY PLANNING & MANAGEMENT magazine. Even for a business that sells primarily over the phone, computer downtime costs can be more than $100,000 per hour. At these levels, a lengthy computer outage threatens a company's very survival.

EXPECTING THE UNEXPECTED. . . AND THE EXPECTED

Recent California events notwithstanding, power outages are rare. Other natural disasters - such as fires, floods, earthquakes and lightning strikes - can also shut computers down. They may occur less frequently, but they do happen. Just ask businesses in Seattle. However, unexpected events are not the worst of it.

Computer hardware and software must occasionally be upgraded. Databases must regularly be backed up and maintained. In traditional environments, these activities normally require stopping or, at best, severely hampering the performance of the affected computer systems. Typically, more than 80 percent of system downtime results from these planned activities. In fact, on the most reliable of computers, more than 95 percent of downtime is planned, according to the Gartner Group, a High Technology research and consulting consortium, www4.gartner.com.

At one time, planned downtime could be scheduled during "off-hours." Now, global companies situate facilities in time zones around the world. Your customer service call, for example, may be routed to one of a number of widely separated call centers. What's more, business is increasingly conducted 24 hours a day on the Internet.

The result of these trends is that "off-hours" often don't exist anymore. When that happens, companies cannot tolerate any downtime, whether planned or unplanned.

ELIMINATING ALL DOWNTIME

The answer is redundancy. By maintaining an exact duplicate of critical software (applications) and data on a second computer, a business always has a backup to rely on should its primary system become unavailable.

That's the approach adopted by Sunkist, a global seller of citrus fruit and the largest agricultural cooperative in the United States. Computers are fundamental to the sales process at Sunkist, so unavailable systems translate into lost opportunities. Since fruit is perishable, what isn't sold today may have to be turned into juice, a less profitable product.

Sunkist manages its sales on AS/400®, a midrange computing system from IBM®. While AS/400 has a truly outstanding reliability rating, Sunkist's databases, software and hardware require periodic maintenance. To keep its business running during this maintenance, and during any unexpected system shutdowns, Sunkist maintains a backup system using MIMIX®, software and services from Lakeview Technology that help companies manage the availability of their systems.

Whenever Sunkist enters a sale into its databases or changes any other data or programs, MIMIX automatically duplicates that change. The result is two identical systems - one backing up the other. MIMIX also monitors the primary system and, should it become unavailable, switches operations to the backup system. In addition, Sunkist can use MIMIX to manually switch to the backup when it needs to perform primary system maintenance.

There are obvious costs associated with maintaining duplicate systems, but those costs usually generate a substantial return on investment. "We save millions of dollars a day by always having systems available," explains Amhad Zare, manager of technical support at Sunkist.

Acompany with particularly critical systems might choose to implement multiple levels of redundancy so that even if two systems shut down simultaneously, it can fall back on a third and possibly more backups. Moreover, redundant systems can be geographically separated so that operations can continue even if a natural disaster shuts down a whole city.

Redundancy used to be employees' most feared word. It may still be, but when it comes to protecting critical business data and systems, redundancy is the least stressful and safest decision a business can make.

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-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001