Uptime Matters, for Cars and Data Centers

I have a 2003 Subaru Outback. I love the car. My wife loves the car. Living in Utah, we’ve used it to hit up the national parks, camping in the mountains, deserts and forests. This car has fostered many happy memories for our family.

But do you know what I really hate? Car downtime. My wife and I spent some serious time over the last few weeks debating and analyzing what we want to do with this car. We just passed 200k miles on our odometer and we are finding more and more that we are putting it in the shop for repairs. This car that we love is not giving us the uptime we need and is becoming costly and interrupting our schedule. We don’t dare take it on longer trips anymore, renting a car in some cases and incurring more costs.

Luckily, we aren’t using our cars to run a business. I’m not an Uber driver, or a courier, or even a pizza delivery man, but if I was, I would guarantee you I would want a more dependable car. Take that to the business level, and they work constantly to keep their fleet of vehicles maintained and running smoothly.

I think you can see where I am going with this. If you are running mission-critical workloads, you want them running on both hardware and software that will allow you the most uptime possible, while minimizing the downtime needed for maintenance. If your systems are going down regularly, and your hardware is unreliable, then you are experiencing that pain that I’m currently experiencing with my car. And not everyone has a budget for a luxury option.

There’s three ways SUSE suggests you can limit your downtime:

• Prevent Hardware Downtime
• Maximize Service Availability
•  Minimize Human Mistakes

I think I’ve got most of my human driving mistakes handled (haven’t crashed it lately), but it is important to consider the hardware and software especially with a car. In the data center, it becomes a true question of business cost, ROI, vs reliability when it’s time to purchase new hardware and software, and put systems in place to make sure you aren’t making mistakes or taking the servers down for updates or patches when you don’t actually need to.

All and any downtime is costing you. It shuts down the production line, aborts transactions or even brings your core business to a standstill, impacting your revenues and reputation. Take a look at these six customer case studies and follow our three ways to limit downtime with SUSE Solutions, and I’ll look into getting the reliable vehicle my family needs for the future.