High Availability

4Points offers a series of complete high availability services ranging from high availability audits and assessments to full-blown high availability implementations. In particular, we are expert at assessing high availability requirements throughout the enterprise and matching them to the various technical capabilities within organizations using a proven and formalized HA assessment methodology. Our HA assessment methodology is completely DBMS or Vendor software independent and we can help our customers to optimize throughout their complex heterogeneous enterprise environments.

A typical HA Assessment service offering can be completed in approximately 2 weeks and would be done by a small two-person HA consultant architect team from 4Points. An example of the tasks that are included in an assessment project are:

Task 1 - Describe the current state of the application
- Data (data usage and physical implementation)
- Process (business processes being supported)
- Technology (hardware/software platform/configuration)
- Backup/recovery procedures
- Standards/guidelines used
- Testing/QA process employed
- Service level agreement ( SLA) currently defined
- Level of expertise of personnel administering system
- Level of expertise of personnel developing/testing system

Task 2 - Describe the future state of the application
- Data (data usage and physical implementation, data volume growth, data resilience)
- Process (business processes being supported, expanded functionality anticipated, and application resilience)
- Technology (Hardware/software platform/configuration, new technology being acquired)
- Backup/recovery procedures being planned
- Standards/guidelines used or being enhanced
- Testing/QA process being changed or enhanced
- Service level agreement( SLA) desired (from here on out)
- Level of expertise of personnel administering system (planned training and hiring)
- Level of expertise of personnel developing/testing system (planned training and hiring)

Task 3 - Describe the unplanned downtime reasons at different intervals (last 7 days, last month, last quarter, last six months, last year) [NOTE: If this is a new application then this task is an estimate of the future month, quarter, six-months, and one year intervals]

Task 4 - Describe the planned downtime reasons at different intervals (last 7 days, last month, last quarter, last six months, last year) [NOTE: If this is a new application then this task is an estimate of the future month, quarter, six-months, and one-year intervals]

Task 5 - Calculate the availability percentage across different time intervals (last 7 days, last month, last quarter, last six months, last year). [NOTE: If this is a new application then this task is an estimate of the future month, quarter, six-months, and one-year intervals]

Task 6 - Calculate the loss of downtime

Task 7 – Assessment results and recommendations.