VideoIf the thought of a little downtime sounds good to you, keep it to yourself. In today's wired world, "downtime" doesn't connote a day at the beach, but rather a technological headache that will most likely have your IT staff racing toward whichever server is on the blink.
Odds are good they'll have plenty of machines from which to choose. Servers became the workhorses of corporate computing in the wake of the client/server revolution of the mid-1990s, and now figure so prominently in E-business infrastructure that they have become part of the common vernacular. Server fiascoes made national headlines during each of the last two Christmas seasons, as the systems of online retailers wilted under enormous customer demand. Among the more Net literate, the Web's common "Server not responding" error message is used to describe someone who is a bit slow on the uptake.
A Click Away
When that message does flash across a computer screen, it may well mean that a server problem is about to prove costly. "When customers see your site is too busy, too slow, or unreliable, they may assume that your business is too busy, too slow, or unreliable," says technology analyst Peter Firstbrook of Meta Group Inc., in Stamford, Connecticut. "In E-commerce, the competition is a click away."
That means that choices about servers — which ones to buy, how to incorporate them into an IT infrastructure, how to acquire them most cost-effectively — are now a major part of a company's technology strategy. Reliability is crucial, but context is everything. Knowing just what a server is expected to do, now and in the future, often determines which choices are the most sensible.
Firstbrook is quick to point out that hardware does not act alone — applications and networks are equally important elements of a successful E-commerce platform. Even hardware vendors agree. "We've gotten away from quoting 9s," says Mike Maas, director of Web server products at IBM in White Plains, New York, referring to the common vendor practice of one-upping competitors by issuing server-reliability quotes such as 99.999 percent or 99.9999 percent. IBM opted out of these decimal duels, he says, because "reliability is so dependent on the application and the infrastructure."
If the relationship among software, hardware, and other elements of corporate operations is complex, the situation becomes even more difficult when companies move their businesses online. "Because of the nature of E-commerce, the scale is often unknown," notes Firstbrook. "The infrastructure has to be designed so it can scale incrementally," meaning it can add capacity as needs dictate. This is where the enormous variety of servers can be a blessing or a curse. A bad decision can mean that a powerful — and expensive — server will go underused, he says. Alternatively, companies that underestimate demand can find themselves desperately adding servers every month.
But capacity alone is not the issue. In techno-speak, the primary issue for servers in mission- critical roles is "high availability," or HA. Like the word "server," HA varies in meaning — and cost. "Availability needs to be measured in terms of the degree to which the server directly supports the business," says Peter Burris, another analyst at Meta Group. In other words, HA is one area of IT where the cost of each "nine" can — and must — be weighed against the costs, tangible and intangible, of downtime. For some companies, a 10-minute outage may be acceptable; for others, it can be disastrous.
Mirror, Mirror
And availability isn't just about the size of a server, but about its design and its reliance on supporting technologies. Last year, for example, the Bank of New York spent more than $10 million to beef up the reliability of its online Inform system, says Richard A. Pace, executive vice president and chief technologist. Inform offers clients access to most of the bank's products and services, and over the past five years "has become a primary way for us to deal with business customers," he says. Today, more than 2,000 of the bank's business clients use the system to get information, compile customized reports, and enact high-value transactions, including instructions to receive or deliver securities or cash, or to open or confirm trade credits. "These are high-value transactions in a deadline-sensitive environment," notes Pace.
Inform's customers, who include finance executives, treasury managers, investment managers, and compliance officers, use standard Web browsers to navigate the system, and more than half access the system through the Internet, says Pace. Large corporate clients (typically those with more than 100 users) tend to use private-line access for speed and reliability of connection.
Like most online transaction environments, Inform requires a wide range of servers on which to run. Most of the back-end transaction processing takes place on IBM mainframes. To make it easier to generate reports, mainframe data is replicated to a Sybase database on Sun servers. Inform's Web applications are also handled by Sun servers. Inform relies on a large bank of 59 Compaq NT servers, about half of which are used to compile specialized reports from the data held in the Sun server database.
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