W H I T E P AP E R
T h e I m p o r t a n c e o f H i g h A v a i l a b i l i t y S o l u t i o n s I n c r e a s e s w i t h t h e C h a n g e s i n N e x t - G e n e r a t i o n P l a t f o r m s
Sponsored by: NEC
Mitsuhiro Iriya
September 2011
I D C O P I N I O N
IT systems support on operations and services is a crucial challenge for enterprises
and organizations, as well as increasing their availability. One of the most effective
ways of improving availability is to make use of high availability (HA) solutions
based on availability and clustering software. At NEC, the CLUSTERPRO
(EXPRESSCLUSTER for international markets) is at the heart of an HA strategy that
will bring higher reliability to enterprises and organizations.
The following is a summary of the key points in this white paper:
The availability and clustering software market continues to achieve strong
growth in the Asia/Pacific region and the demand for HA is expanding. Shares of
sales broken down by vendors for 2010 show NEC to be in the top position, with
year-over-year (YoY) growth of approximately 30%.
In a growing number of cases, Linux is adopted for mission-critical systems,
expanding the installed base of availability and clustering software. NEC has
been involved in the Linux market since early on and has a growing track record,
particularly in projects for the financial services and telecommunications
industries, and also for government agencies. In 2010, it had a 37.5% share
(by vendor) of sales in Linux environments, ranking it as a leader in HA solutions.
A major challenge for virtualization environments will be improving availability as
server virtualization spreads. A crucial factor to meet this demand will be the
provision of sufficient HA to physical machines and virtual machines, as well as
the application layers that run on them.
Enterprises always face unforeseeable risks, for instance earthquakes and other
natural disasters. It is imperative that they improve business continuity with
effective utilization of HA solutions in disaster recovery and similar situations.
NEC's CLUSTERPRO HA strategy expands the potential for HA solutions in
three key directions: fast response to a wide range of platforms; improved
reliability through enhancements and expansions to core functions; and
expanded scope of application in disaster recovery and similar situations.
IDC forecasts the Asia/Pacific availability and clustering software market will
continue to grow at high levels. Growth potential is particularly high for China,
India, and ASEAN countries, all of which have extremely promising markets.
Ensuring and managing integrated availability in environments that contain mixed
OSs and virtualization platforms is a key point in cloud computing-ready HA
IDC
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2 #202133_EN ©2011 IDC
solutions going forward. This is a major advantage for NEC, which will be able to
offer users highly reliable cloud platforms ahead of the competition.
H I G H AV A I L A B I L I T Y : T H E C O R E I S S U E
IT plays an important role in enterprise and organizational activities. For many
companies, the ability to provide services across national and regional borders
24 hours a day, 365 days a year is taken for granted, and IT systems are key support
for this. From a different perspective, this is also an indication of just how dependent
enterprises and organizations are on IT systems. Such dependency is driving the
need for increased availability of IT systems and making implementation of effective
HA solutions a key IT challenge.
More than anything else, IT managers must strive to avoid business disruption due to
unexpected system failures. A system failure can bring operations and services to a
halt, resulting in obvious loss of business opportunities, as well as untold damage to
credibility among customers, suppliers, shareholders, and other stakeholders. IT
managers must protect the data and application assets that are central to operations
and services, both from sudden failures of hardware, OSs, and applications and from
disasters like earthquakes and fires. They must ensure high availability for mission-
critical systems that provide core corporate services like financial accounting and
sales management, as well as Web-based customer services like e-commerce sites
and online transactions.
There are many approaches to increasing the availability of IT systems, but the most
important point is whether, when there is a failure, the workload can be switched over
to other hardware without disrupting operations and services. This can be ensured by
using HA clustering software. A wide range of solutions is possible for disaster
recovery and HA virtualization environments, for example, failover strategies that
switch systems from production servers to standby servers.
IDC defines availability and clustering software as HA clustering software and
other software with functions to increase system availability. In this white paper,
we examine trends in the Asia/Pacific availability and clustering software market
and consider future HA strategies based on NEC's CLUSTERPRO HA clustering
software.
©2011 IDC #202133_EN 3
A V A I L A B I L I T Y A N D C L U S T E R I N G S O F T W AR E M A R K E T T R E N D S
In 2010, the Asia/Pacific availability and clustering software market was worth
US$313 million and growing strongly at 9.9% YoY. Users are becoming more and
more aware of IT system availability issues, and are investing more in availability and
clustering software as a result. The rapid spread of virtualization technology also
promotes market growth, as do initiatives to improve the availability of virtualization
platforms.
Figure 1 contains shares of sales broken down by vendors for 2010 in the
Asia/Pacific availability and clustering software market. NEC, which develops and
markets CLUSTERPRO, has the number 1 share at 21.6%. The company achieved
extremely high growth in 2010; sales were up 29.6% YoY.
F I G U R E 1
A s i a / P a c i f i c A v a i l a b i l i t y a n d C l u s t e r i n g S o f t w a r e M a r k e t S h a r e s
b y V en d o r s , 2 0 1 0
Note: Asia/Pacific includes Australia, China (PRC), Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea,
Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand.
Source: IDC, September 2011
4 #202133_EN ©2011 IDC
M a r k e t T r e n d s i n L e a d i n g C o u n t r i e s i n t h e
E x p a n d i n g A s i a / P a c i f i c R e g i o n
Figure 2 shows the 2010 YoY sales growth rates for the Asia/Pacific availability and
clustering software markets in Japan, China, India and the five leading ASEAN
countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand). Growth in
Japan was 10.4%, China 2.1%, India 6.5%, and the five major ASEAN countries
17.0%. The following is a discussion of trends in national and regional markets.
Japan
The Japan market was worth US$221 million in 2010 and accounted for 70% of
Asia/Pacific as a whole. In a growing number of cases, availability and clustering
software is applied to Linux mission-critical systems requiring HA. The Linux market
grew in excess of 30% YoY. Growth is particularly high for online trading systems in
the financial services industry, primarily brokerages. Another key area to watch is the
move to HA for VMware, vSphere and other virtualization environments, where use of
availability and clustering software is growing.
China
The China market was worth US$15.62 million in 2010, ranking in third by size
in Asia/Pacific. The country is building large-scale mission-critical systems in the
banking, securities, telecommunications, and manufacturing sectors in preparation for
rapid economic growth and globalization. HA is crucial for these systems and the
demand for availability and clustering software is growing. The country is also making
progress on the virtualization of enterprise datacenters and is moving to virtualization
environments for databases, email systems, and other business-critical applications.
This is raising the expectations for HA solutions for virtualization environments and
expanding the latent demand for availability and clustering software.
India
The India market was worth US$15.51 million in 2010, ranking on par with China.
The market continues to achieve solid growth at 6.5% YoY. Finance,
telecommunications, government, and IT services are the leading sectors in the
market. Windows servers are the most common system platform and most of the
volume is Windows-based availability and clustering software. Progress is seen on
the implementation of failover-based HA for virtualization environments built with
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. However, over the past several years, there has
been a growing adoption of Linux servers — particularly among small and
medium-sized enterprises — and Linux environment HA solutions attract
considerable attention. Larger enterprises are also moving to adopt Linux and going
forward there will probably be demand for HA in environments that contain a mixture
of Windows and Linux systems.
©2011 IDC #202133_EN 5
Five Major ASEAN Countries
The market in the five major ASEAN countries was worth US$16.53 million in 2010
with a 17.0% YoY growth rate, well above Japan, China, or India. Singapore drives
the growth and accounts for approximately 60% of the market created by the five
major ASEAN countries. In addition, its growth rate is a strong 17.7%. Singapore has
a large number of global enterprises, as well as of datacenters. Growth has been
particularly fast for cloud-oriented datacenters and awareness of availability is
extremely high. These trends in turn create rapid expansion in the demand for
HA solutions. Growth is also high in Malaysia and other countries, and the overall
demand for HA is rising in ASEAN.
F I G U R E 2
F i v e M a j o r A S E A N C o u n t r i e s Y e a r - o v e r - Y e a r S a l e s G r o w t h
R a t e s a n d t h e A s i a / P a c i f i c A v a i l a b i l i t y a n d C l u s t e r i n g S o f t w a r e
M a r k e t , 2 0 1 0
Note: The five major ASEAN countries are: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and
Thailand.
Source: IDC, September 2011
6 #202133_EN ©2011 IDC
G r o w t h o f H i g h A v a i l a b i l i t y S o l u t i o n s f o r
L i n u x
Figure 3 contains YoY sales growth rates broken down by OS for the 2010
Asia/Pacific availability and clustering software market. The growth rate for Linux was
33.4%, far larger than Windows or UNIX. Linux also accounts for 33.6% of the total
availability and clustering software market, giving it the largest share.
In many cases, Linux has taken over the mission-critical systems that require high
availability and used to be run on UNIX. For example, the New York Stock Exchange
and Tokyo Stock Exchange use Linux as the platform for their trading systems and
the London Stock Exchange has announced plans to make a full switchover to Linux.
In addition to these world-famous examples, many other enterprises and
organizations are adopting Linux for mission-critical systems and introducing
availability and clustering software, which is expanding the scope for solutions that
increase availability.
F I G U R E 3
A s i a / P a c i f i c A v a i l a b i l i t y a n d C l u s t e r i n g S o f t w a r e M a r k e t
Y e a r - o v e r - Y e a r G r o w t h R a t e b y O S , 2 0 1 0
Note: Asia/Pacific includes Australia, China (PRC), Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea,
Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand.
Source: IDC, September 2011
©2011 IDC #202133_EN 7
Figure 4 contains data that backs up the move to HA in Linux. We have calculated a
"HA deployment rate" that measures the degree of HA from availability and clustering
software in the Linux servers newly shipped each year. The data presented focuses
on Japan, one of the most "conservative" countries in the world. By "conservative,"
we mean "tends to use UNIX servers and mainframes for systems requiring
availability even though they are expensive and provide more support than
necessary." The sharp rise in the Linux HA deployment rate over the last two years in
this most "conservative" country indicates a growing number of cases in which
mission-critical systems are built with a combination of x86 servers running Linux and
availability and clustering software. This appears the optimum choice for developing
low-cost, high-availability systems.
F I G U R E 4
L i n u x E n v i r o n m en t H i gh - A v a i l a b i l i t y D e p l o ym e n t R a t e s i n t h e
J a p a n A v a i l a b i l i t y a n d C l u s t e r i n g S o f t w a r e M a r k e t , 2 0 0 1 – 2 0 1 0
Source: IDC, September 2011
Figure 5 contains share of sales broken down by vendor for Linux availability and
clustering software market in Asia/Pacific in 2010. NEC has the number 1 share of
the market as a whole and is also a market leader in Linux with a 37.5% share.
NEC saw the growth potential of the Linux market early on and move to launch and
enhance Linux products ahead of other vendors, for example, by supporting a
wide range of Linux distributions. These efforts really began to pay off in 2009
when the company reported a 90% increase in sales, followed by another 58% in
2010. The company has attracted a broad range of customers, from large-scale
Linux-based mission-critical systems in the financial services sector requiring more
than 100 nodes to telecommunications companies, government agencies, and
manufacturing firms.
8 #202133_EN ©2011 IDC
F I G U R E 5
A s i a / P a c i f i c L i n u x A v a i l a b i l i t y a n d C l u s t e r i n g S o f t w a r e M a r k e t
S h a r e o f S a l e s b y V e n d o r 2 0 1 0
Note: Asia/Pacific includes Australia, China (PRC), Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea,
Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand.
Source: IDC, September 2011
Figure 6 contains forecast OS shares of Asia/Pacific server shipping volumes from
2010 to 2015. IDC forecasts the share of Linux servers will continue to increase.
As this takes place, more of the applications running on Linux servers will be
mission-critical, and the demand for Linux environment HA solutions will expand
even further.
One must also be aware of the potential for the introduction of Linux environments to
other environments that already have large installed Windows platforms. Enterprises
and organizations using x86 servers often use Windows and Linux side-by-side.
There is also the potential that cost and expandability considerations will cause
locations currently using Windows-servers only to install Linux servers when building
new systems. It would be inefficient to manage Windows and Linux availability
individually when they make use of the same hardware platform, and this will raise
the need for integrated management and the efficiency gains it will achieve.
©2011 IDC #202133_EN 9
F I G U R E 6
F o r e c a s t O S S h a r e s o f A s i a / P a c i f i c S e r v e r S h i p p i n g V o l u m e s ,
2 0 1 0– 2 0 1 5
Note: Asia/Pacific includes Australia, China (PRC), Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea,
Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand.
Source: IDC, September 2011
G r o w i n g I m p o r t a n c e o f H i g h - A v a i l a b i l i t y
S o l u t i o n s i n t h e E x p a n s i o n o f V i r t u a l
E n v i r o n m e n t
Server virtualization using hypervisors and other virtual machine software is in the
process of rapid expansion. Figure 7 contains forecasts for the Asia/Pacific virtual
machine software market. Growth is surprisingly strong; in terms of sales, the market
grew five times between 2006 and 2010. We forecast continued growth for this
market, with a 2010–2015 compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.0%, and
anticipate a steady increase in the number of systems built on virtualization
environments.
10 #202133_EN ©2011 IDC
F I G U R E 7
F o r e c a s t S a l e s f o r t h e A s i a / P a c i f i c V i r t u a l M a c h i n e S o f t w a r e
M a r k e t 2 0 0 6—2 0 1 5
Note: Asia/Pacific includes Australia, China (PRC), Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea,
Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand.
Source: IDC, September 2011
Driving the rapid expansion of server virtualization are substantial cost-savings on the
hardware that integrates physical servers and its operations and maintenance.
However, the risks associated with physical servers also become larger because
multiple applications are concentrated on a single physical server. If, for example,
a physical server stops, so do all the virtual machines running on it. The greater the
extent of server virtualization, the greater the risk, and therefore the greater the
demand for HA.
To virtualization software packages that include hypervisors and other virtualization
environment management function modules, basic HA function modules may also be
included but they are inadequate to address sudden failures as they do not allow
monitoring of applications on a guest OS and they lack many other features for
effective HA. This makes it important to provide HA for all layers ― the physical
machine, virtual machine, and applications ― by using third-party availability and
clustering software.
There are a number of different hypervisor options available, including VMware
vSphere, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, and the open source Xen and KVM.
All offer distinctive functionality, performance, and pricing; and in some cases users
will have different choices depending upon the purposes of the system. Like mixed
Windows/Linux environments, there will probably be more mixed hypervisor
environments in the future. As that happens, one must be aware of the need for
integrated availability management of virtualization environments comprising multiple,
different hypervisors.
©2011 IDC #202133_EN 11
B u s i n e s s C o n t i n u i t y a n d H i g h A v a i l a b i l i t y
On March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. The
destruction was immense; between the shaking and the subsequent tsunami, more
than 20,000 people were dead or missing. The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi
Nuclear Power Station also plunged the Greater Tokyo area into an electric power
shortage. Most enterprises had strengthened quake-proofing their datacenter
structures in preparation for disaster, but no one anticipated power shortages.
Enterprises quickly began to move systems to other areas in Japan where power is
available or offshore their datacenters. They also began to create and review disaster
recovery systems and to formulate new business continuity plans.
Such unforeseen circumstances are not limited to Japan; they can occur anywhere in
the Asia/Pacific region, and indeed, anywhere in the world. It is imperative that we be
aware of the risks threatening enterprise activities: earthquakes and other natural
disasters, terrorism, riot, war. Asia is a particularly earthquake-prone part of the world
and the potential for damage is higher from the secondary impacts of disaster, such
as loss of electric power and other lifelines, than from direct impacts. Corporate IT
departments must create datacenter disaster recovery systems that mitigate all
significant risks to business continuity.
The most important point in building a disaster recovery system is to minimize the
downtime after disaster occurs. Backups and similar strategies might be used to
move data and applications to other datacenters, but they are of no value if too much
time is required to restore systems to normal operations. The opportunity costs are
great and impossible to recover. Advanced mechanisms are required to enable
operations to continue at recovery datacenters with minimal downtime.
Availability and clustering software-based HA solutions can be used to build these
kinds of disaster recovery mechanisms. A clustering system that uses failover to a
remote datacenter can create the same environment that was operating in the
primary datacenter. There are many different solutions for disaster recovery, but this
is one of the most practical, least expensive and most reliable solutions available, and
a growing number of enterprises are taking advantage of it.
12 #202133_EN ©2011 IDC
N E C ’ S H I G H AV A I L A B I L I T Y S O L U T I O N S T R AT E G Y T O E X P AN D E AS E O F U S E
L e a d i n g C o m p a n y i n A v a i l a b i l i t y a n d
C l u s t e r i n g S o f t w a r e
NEC x86 servers boast the top share of the domestic Japan market. A report
published by IDC in April 2011 found that its share of domestic x86 server shipping
volumes was 24.7% (refer to Japan Server 2011–2015 Forecast and 2010 Analysis:
The Effect of the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, IDC #JP1573103T, June 2011).
As was already noted, through its development and marketing of CLUSTERPRO HA
clustering software, NEC achieved a number 1 ranking in the 2010 vendor sales
league table for the Asia/Pacific availability and clustering software market.
It has a particularly strong track record in Japan, with number 1 shares of both the
Windows and Linux markets, and the market as a whole (refer to Japan System
Software 2011–2015 Forecast and 2010 Analysis: The Effect of the Great Eastern
Japan Earthquake, IDC #JP1677102T, August 2011).
This track record in Japan gives NEC a basis for expanding its products to the North
American, European, and global markets under the EXPRESSCLUSTER brand name.
Asia/Pacific has been a point of focus in its marketing efforts over the past several
years. Results are expanding in China and Southeast Asian countries, and the
company is also moving into India. It is eyeing future expansions into the potentially
high-growth markets of Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
N E C ’ s H i g h A v a i l a b i l i t y S o l u t i o n s S t r a t e g y
NEC is moving forward on three vectors in the development of its core
CLUSTERPRO products as it takes its HA solutions strategy global:
Expand supported platforms. Supporting rapidly growing new OS,
new virtual platform, and cloud infrastructure.
Enhance core functions. Support for warning sign detection, enhanced failure
detection, and shorter switchover times
Expand solutions applications. Application to disaster recovery, support for
network devices, support for appliance products, and so forth.
©2011 IDC #202133_EN 13
Expansion of Supported Platforms
A growing number of the IT systems at enterprises and organizations are a mixture of
different OSs (Linux and Windows) and different versions of the same OS (Windows
Server 2003–2008). Another potential complexity in IT system management is the
creation of virtualization environments with different hypervisors. NEC is expanding
the platforms supported by CLUSTERPRO to adapt to platform environments in
which there are compound combinations of OSs and virtualization platforms. It is
unknown at the current point in time what will emerge as the dominant platform in
cloud computing, but NEC is able to adapt to all major options.
Enhanced Core Functions
System failures are caused by many different factors. It is important to perform broad
monitoring and reliably detect failures when they occur, whether they are in the
hardware, the OS, or the application. System availability is only maintained with fast,
reliable failover in response to failure. CLUSTERPRO detects warning signs and
switches over to a stable server to reduce system downtime. The company continues
to strengthen core functions like failure detection, warning detection, and failover to
provide more reliable HA functions. The effect of this will be particularly significant in
mission-critical domains.
Expansion of Cluster Applications
NEC's goal is to use HA clustering software to develop high value-added HA solutions.
Disaster recovery is an area of particular emphasis. CLUSTERPRO has functions to
cluster across remote sites to enable the recovery of both data and applications in the
event of disaster. The company will continue to develop a wider range of clustering
applications and offer higher value-added HA solutions.
F U T U R E O U T L O O K
A v a i l a b i l i t y a n d C l u s t e r i n g S o f t w a r e M a r k e t
F o r e c a s t
The Asia/Pacific availability and clustering software market will continue to grow at
high levels. Asia/Pacific forecasts a CAGR of 6.1% for the 2010–2015 period.
Figure 8 contains our YoY sales growth forecast for 2011–2015. The figure indicates
growth rates for Japan and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan).
Growth will be extremely high for Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan). The area will
maintain growth rates in excess of 10% after 2012, and indeed growth rates will be
increasing. IDC forecasts CAGR of 12.2% for the 2010–2015 period. We anticipate
that China, India and the ASEAN countries will accelerate deployment because of the
high demand for availability and clustering software-based HA. Japan will experience
a temporary economic slump as a result of the East Japan Great Earthquake of 2011,
but will maintain solid growth thereafter. As an overall trend for Asia/Pacific, we
forecast a continued contraction in the UNIX market, and continued high growth in the
Linux and Windows markets.
14 #202133_EN ©2011 IDC
F I G U R E 8
Y e a r - o v e r - Y e a r S a l e s G r o w t h F o r e c a s t s f o r t h e A s i a / P a c i f i c
A v a i l a b i l i t y a n d C l u s t e r i n g S o f t w a r e M a r k e t , 2 0 1 1 – 2 0 1 5
Source: IDC, September 2011
F u t u r e H i g h A v a i l a b i l i t y S o l u t i o n s
Enterprises and organizations are continually confronted by the threat of system
stoppage from unexpected events, whether they be hardware and software failures,
natural disasters or even terrorism. The electric power shortages in the wake of the
Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and nuclear power plant accident were indeed
beyond what anyone had envisioned. IT systems are the basis for the services
provided to customers, suppliers, and employees; and it is not overstating the case to
say that their reliability is an indicator of the organization's performance. Availability
and clustering software-based HA will therefore take on even greater importance in
the future. There will also be a wider range of higher value-added solutions that can
be achieved, disaster recovery not least among them.
Meanwhile, the environment for IT systems is constantly evolving and changing to
keep pace with technology. Virtualization has had a particularly large impact that has
changed how platforms are built and operated. As this takes place, one of the key
challenges to tackle will be the improvement of the availability in virtualization
environments. The importance of HA will only increase as virtualization environments
expand to mission-critical domains. The management of availability, however, will
only grow more complex as different combinations of virtualization platforms and
guest OSs proliferate — something already seen with hypervisors. In many cases,
Typical OS and virtualization platforms do not provide adequate HA reliability and
management efficiency. This will increase the need for third-party availability and
clustering software that provides multi-platform support.
©2011 IDC #202133_EN 15
The same point can be made with respect to cloud computing. Many different forms
of cloud computing are being attempted — for example, public cloud and private
clouds — but whichever prevails, the availability of the cloud platform will be the most
important factor. Availability and clustering software-based HA will play a major role in
this. Studies are currently being done regarding the OSs and hypervisors to use in
cloud platforms, but regardless of the outcome, it is highly likely that a wide range and
variety of platform environments will be built to deal with the wide range of user needs.
Support for multi-platform environments that contain combinations of different OSs
and virtualization platforms will translate into support for cloud computing platform
environments.
C O N C L U S I O N
This white paper observes NEC's market opportunities and challenges in the HA
solutions business, and makes recommendations to users.
M a r k e t O p p o r t u n i t i e s a n d C h a l l e n g e s o f N E C
Opportunities
NEC can expect further expansion in its HA solutions business. Continued
growth is forecast for the Asia/Pacific availability and clustering software market,
and the company has already solidified its position as a market leader in Linux
environments. Its strong track record in Japan, where high levels of availability
are required, has given it a foundation of expertise from which to earn the
confidence of customers around the world for its HA solutions.
Virtualization environments and cloud environments are multi-platform in nature,
containing a wide range of OSs and virtualization platforms. NEC emphasizes
quick response to many different platforms, which will have significant impact for
the company as the cloud comes into its own. By combining this with disaster
recovery and other high value-added HA solutions, the company can achieve a
robust cloud platform.
Challenges
HA functions added to some OSs and virtualization software packages may bite
into the market opportunities for third-party availability and clustering software.
NEC will need to offer users valuable HA solutions that supplement and integrate
with these functions.
16 #202133_EN ©2011 IDC
R e c o m m e n d a t i o n s t o U s e r s
HA measures in a virtual environment. Some applications that operate in
virtualization environments pose significant risks to reliability. Users are
encouraged to study their plans carefully and give full consideration to HA in
virtualization and cloud environments, such as what applications to virtualize,
which virtualization platforms and guest OSs to use (including the potential for
mixed environments).
Investment in reliability. Different enterprises will require different levels of
availability from their IT systems depending upon their form, size, operations, and
services. There can be no compromise on HA for systems that require high
levels of availability. Even a seemingly minor compromise can often lead to
significant losses. It will be important to invest sufficiently in HA, including the
availability and clustering software that will improve reliability.
Effective utilization of diverse HA solutions. No one knows what will happen
when. It is necessary to be constantly prepared for unforeseen and
unforeseeable events. The scope of application for availability and clustering
software is expanding into areas like disaster recovery. Within that, there are
large numbers of HA solutions that can be achieved at lower cost than other
approaches without harming reliability. Different possibilities should be explored.
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