By High availability (HA) in IT environments is crucial, ensuring seamless operation and uninterrupted business continuity. In this episode, Philip Merry, Solution Engineer at SIOS Technology, discusses the complexities of optimizing IT systems for high availability and he goes on to share strategies and best practices to help organizations tackle these challenges. Merry says, “When it comes time to do anything to a production system, nothing should be a surprise; make sure everything’s tested beforehand. There’s no such thing as being too prepared.”
Optimizing IT systems for high availability, including challenges and strategies
- Merry explains that high availability is crucial for IT systems essential to business operations, such as customer transaction databases. While others do not directly affect business operations, they are nice to have highly available.
- Two common challenges in optimizing IT systems for high availability include resolving issues quickly and minimizing downtime.
- Antivirus solutions that are overprotective and disable critical applications by quarantining essential files can negatively affect databases and high-availability suites.
- Merry discusses the importance of managing firewall rules and access controls to ensure proper communication within the system while maintaining security. He explains why the principle of least privilege access is also challenging.
- Merry emphasizes why failover and disaster recovery are crucial for uptime and high availability.
Disaster recovery and cost-effective solutions for maintaining system uptime
- Merry suggests balancing cost-effectiveness and high availability through several strategies, such as using managed services like AWS Elastic File System.
- For disaster recovery, organizations should consider if short-term performance degradation is acceptable to reduce costs, only investing heavily if long-term reliability is needed.
- Merry discusses scaling strategies, either scaling up by adding resources to existing servers or scaling out by adding more servers based on application needs, and how this can help manage costs.
- Strong team communication is important and helps facilitate smooth rollouts, reducing the need for additional resources and minimizing overtime costs.
- Merry highlights the importance of collaborating with high availability and application vendors in planning to preemptively address configuration issues, prevent downtime, and maintain system value.
Implementing high availability in IT environments, including security groups, antivirus software, test environments, and product compatibility
- Merry discusses best practices for implementing high availability in IT environments including configuring security groups and access controls and auditing security group rules to minimize security risks.
- Merry emphasizes that understanding and configuring antivirus software is vital to avoiding interference with applications. He suggests setting up exact replica test environments for safe procedure testing before live deployment.
- Merry talks about why it is essential to ensure product compatibility upfront to avoid unnecessary expenses and ensure smooth system operation in the long run.
Guest: Philip Merry (LinkedIn)
Company: SIOS Technology (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk
This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.
