Guest: Eddie Smith
Company: SIOS Technology (Twitter)

Many companies specifically require high levels of availability to avoid the downtime and potential losses, but they’re incredibly interested in reducing costs as well. In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Eddie Smith, Solutions Architect at SIOS Technology, to talk about the market trends he is seeing, particularly in terms of cost cutting and cost efficiency.

Current trends in the market:

• Companies are moving into the cloud space to leverage the cost savings, the efficiencies, and the ability to switch on/switch off as needed.
• Some companies are looking at moving back on-prem for various reasons such as 1) there are some hidden costs with cloud that they didn’t appreciate, 2) they’re not quite disciplined in switching things off when they should, or 3) they’ve refreshed their internal hardware to a point where they don’t need the cloud anymore.
• The advancing march of the software companies: networking being done at the software level, software in the storage and in the operating-system levels are more complex but a lot more cost efficient. For example, at the storage layer, things like deduplication, compression, and compaction, can reduce the storage footprint while removing the amount of space needed in the disaster recovery (DR) site.

An outage/downtime leads to loss of revenue as well as reputation, particularly for public-facing companies. A high availability (HA) solution minimizes downtime and reduces complexity by automating the process end-to-end, from the time an incident occurs to contacting an engineer to fix what’s wrong and switching the systems back on again. Example: An HA solution in a healthcare setting will take all systems, move them to a secure DR site, allow the human-machine interface (HMI) system in its standby state to come up and continue to serve as the application or service lost in the original site.

To avoid outages and increase cost efficiency, companies need to:

• Tighten their monitoring and alerting processes to be aware when something is going/about to go wrong. They can use AI to do proactive health fixes.
• Do effective capacity planning.
• Perform maintenance and upgrades in a timely manner to avoid exposure to potential security holes.
• Maintain proper backups and have effective backup and recovery techniques.
• Use redundant systems to ensure critical systems continue to operate when a component fails. A failed component may be a piece of equipment, software, data, or even a data center.

When looking for a DR solution or HA solution, look at your data first and then work out how to protect it. The cost will depend on a number of things: will it be host-based? How much storage is needed? Do you need a dedicated network? Are you going to use the cloud for storage, compute, or both?

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.