We’re there when it counts

In a world where when using business applications we expect “instant gratification”, nothing can be worse than not being serviced. Whether we are ordering office materials or updating the status of a product evaluation, we expect applications to be “always on” and available in many cases 24/7. Extended outage times for business-critical applications can lead not only to lost revenues, but also to a tarnished corporate image and ultimately the loss of Customer loyalty. In the OpenEdge world a significant proportion of our Customer base relies on our Disaster Recovery solutions such as OpenEdge Replication and OpenEdge Clusters to ensure that systems are protected from single points of failure. Personally, I’ve always thought that Disaster Recovery is somewhat of a misnomer – after all, we invest in active redundancy to prevent the “disaster” from happening in the first place. The term Business Continuity just sounds so much more proactive…

But what about lack of service when there isn’t enough “compute” available when a spike in demand hits the system? How can we perform capacity planning for business applications running on the OpenEdge platform and ensure that we have configured sufficient resources to meet both current and future demand? A great way to get that peace of mind is by deploying OpenEdge Management. OpenEdge Management allows a System Administrator to actively monitor resource consumption in a “set-and-forget” manner. Armed with trend analysis and solid empirical data, compute resources can be confidently configured to ensure that spikes in demand are comfortably met.

Business Continuity is a critical component of application infrastructure design and implementation. High availability is a continuum with unscheduled downtime being just one of the aspects that require thoughtful planning. Proven products such as OpenEdge Replication and OpenEdge Clusters can help to achieve the degree of protection that’s right for your application. Similarly, capacity planning needs to be a science and not an art. OpenEdge Management delivers the tooling to not only monitor resource consumption before issues arise, but also provides valuable input to ongoing system sizing and capacity planning.

In summary, requirements for high availability will vary from Customer to Customer, Application to Application. Progress Business Continuity solutions are sufficiently granular to ensure that Customers can achieve the right level of protection as dictated by the value to the business. At the end of the day, there’s nothing better than peace of mind….

Continue reading...