How ESPN’s “Get Up” Morning Show Can Improve Your High Availability Strategy

ESPN is often a go-to source for information on the NFL. The network is known for providing multiple shows to cover each game, which provide extensive analysis, opinions, and random information about the team, the games, the upcoming schedule, and the coaches in the league as well as highlights of particular players.

Learn from ESPN: Enhance Your High Availability with Two Key Questions

In a segment that aired back on September 13th, 2021 Dan Orlovsky lamented the Chicago Bears’ usage of their rookie quarterback. In doing so, he incidentally provided two ways to improve your high availability with just two questions.
Two questions that will immediately improve your high availability from ESPN’s Dan Orlovsky.

Question number one, what are we doing here?

The Bears offense placed rookie quarterback Justin Fields on the field for a second down play.  The rookie quickly fired a pass for a seven yard completion.  However, instead of continuing with the rookie, the play-callers for the Bears went back to their previous QB who promptly threw the ball to the other team. This play elicited the question from Dan Orlovsky, “What are we doing here?”

Okay, so you are not a rookie quarterback, I think.  And, you are not playing for the Bears, I hope.  But, if you are responsible for any part of your enterprise high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) strategies, including clustering, data protection, data replication, application orchestration, governance/adherence and SLAs, then Orlovsky’s first question is a good place to start.

What are you doing? 

• Are you looking to deploy software and services or remediate a known availability issue?
• Is your team’s central focus on planning for the future, such as moving to the cloud, or addressing some combination of different changes and requirements?
• Is your goal saving cost while meeting regulatory requirements, improving client acquisition through more available resources, or optimizing and improving backend processing?

Answering this question with respect to your enterprise high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) strategies will help clarify a tremendous amount with regards to the solution and architecture you implement, as well as the team and processes associated with them.

Question number two, why are we doing it?

After firing off a series of rapid comments about his frustration with when and how the Chicago Bears used their rookie quarterback, Orlovsky asked the second question, “Why are we doing it?”  If, to paraphrase Orlovsky, the “what” is putting Fields in to check a box and appease the fans, then “why are we doing it?”  Why just check the box, when you could be using more of the dynamic rookie’s abilities to gain an advantage and win games?  Why not make the change that gives you the best chance of being successful.

Of course, we aren’t the coach of the Bears, though I wouldn’t mind calling a few plays.  But, the question still applies to those involved with implementing enterprise availability. Let’s go back to question number one. What was your answer for “what are we doing here?”  Now, answer the question of “why are we doing it?”  Some possible reasons include:

• Providing assurance for data availability
• Saving the business time
• Saving the business money by avoiding costly unplanned downtime
• Saving the business time and money by automating monitoring and recovery
• Deploying an architecture to meet a stringent Service Level Agreement (SLA) or Service Level Objective (SLO)
• Reducing RTO and RPO to zero
• Preventing last year’s disasters from occurring again
• Hedging against the unknown threats of downtime
• Meeting governance requirements
• Checking the box
• Trying not to get fined for noncompliance
• Because management said so

Why are we doing it is a critical question to answer before, during, and after high availability systems have been deployed. As VP of Customer Experience, I worked with a customer whose IT Administrator and DB Administrator had vastly different reasons for “why are we doing it?”  To make matters worse, the executive sponsor held a third view.  Without a properly vetted and communicated “why” the team struggled to properly articulate requirements, and when an incident occurred, their efforts for remediation often created more conflict and questions.

There are likely a number of possible reasons why the Chicago Bears didn’t find success or properly utilize their young QB on the upcoming third down, and an equal number of opinions on what they are trying to accomplish with their franchise and veteran quarterback.  But, even if Orlovsky couldn’t help Bears fans clarify what or why, he did provide the framework for how to immediately improve your HA.  So, how would you answer the two questions: What are we doing for HA?  Why are we doing it?

High Availability Solutions

SIOS Technology Corporation provides high availability cluster software that protects & optimizes IT infrastructures with cluster management for your most important applications. Contact us today for more information about our professional services and support.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Recently, a security provider reported some best practice advice and recommendations for companies in light of rising security threats.  While security threats should receive attention from every business, this advice isn’t limited to cybersecurity; it is equally relevant to HA partners and customers with critical applications and services to protect.

Six Takeaways for HA From Recent Articles on Cybersecurity

1. Take IMMEDIATE steps to ramp up HA
   Waiting for a downtime incident and focusing on fast recovery is a bad strategy.  Preparing and preventing downtime is a better solution.  Start identifying critical Tier1 and Tier2 applications, databases and services. Tier 1 should include all business-critical solutions that cannot be inaccessible. That is, applications that must be available 24/7 and will cause serious business consequences if they go offline. While Tier 2 applications should be running as often as possible, they are less critical and your business can tolerate outages of up to a few hours without significant business impact.
2. Prepare a comprehensive HA protection plan
   Develop a plan for protecting the key applications, databases and services.  Be sure this plan includes architecture and design documentation as well as personnel responsibilities for responding to downtime.  Always prepare a process for deploying clusters in a QA or sandbox environment with an eye to documenting the activities and details into a runbook.  These sandbox and QA systems can also be used for testing, training, and validating upgrades, hotfixes, and maintenance.
3. Recognize and address high availability risks
   All organizations must recognize that no company is safe from the disruption of downtime, regardless of size or location.  Small, medium and large businesses are all susceptible to disasters, whether natural or man-made.  Large organizations will experience their fair share of user errors, data center failures resulting from local construction, failed infrastructure, and outages from networking components.  Small and medium entities, esp. those with on-prem solutions or smaller IT teams, need to add HA protection as well.  While larger companies may lose more money in an outage, small to medium businesses are likely to lose a comparable amount as well.  It is important to note that moving to the cloud is not enough to prevent all risks.
4. Business executives need to lead in high availability strategy
   Preparing for and guarding against downtime is not just an IT team issue.  Business executives need to be onboard with protecting the business from known risks, exposure, and downtime threats.  This means key executives and stakeholders need to proactively ask about HA coverage, plans and staffing.  Business executives should also prepare to make investments in preparing for the unexpected by ensuring full coverage of tier1 applications, databases, services, and data.  They should also proactively expand coverage to tier2 and beyond.
5. The importance of ongoing communication for HA
   Business leadership, Admins from all areas (network, storage, compute, cloud, database, and applications) should convene frequently to discuss new and existing HA threats, new and existing challenges, and ongoing requirements.  Keeping internal team discussions going to understand requirements and business continuity plans is a must.  In fact, HA considerations need to become an integral part of all relevant internal planning and communications from the C-level to the entry level.  However, this communication cannot stop with in-house stakeholders.  Instead, business leaders and HA stakeholders must review corporate posture, HA requirements, and critical findings with the HA vendor and their R&D and support teams.
6. Don’t wait for a disaster to review your HA solution
   Companies need to review their plans and ability to execute those plans on a frequent basis.  This review needs to go deeper than reading the runbook, documentation, or cluster design.  Review the runbook alongside hands-on exercises to validate and update the runbook.  Test the process for restoring systems after downtime, including client and business operation restoration

Act Now to Protect Your Systems from Downtime

Similar to security recommendations, companies should take immediate action to secure their systems, solutions, applications and data from downtime and disasters. Don’t wait for a disaster to reveal gaps in your HA strategy. Contact SIOS today to enhance your HA strategy and safeguard your business against unexpected disruptions.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS