IT Survey Reveals Measurement is Lacking for Unplanned Downtime

The usual suspects for unplanned downtime can be equipment or component failures, but tied to critical hardware is plenty of software. With so many applications relying on services or software, server redundancy is another tool to use in the manufacturing world.

A recent study by Stratus Technologies, a provider of continuous availability server solutions, reveals some interesting facts about what is measured by manufacturers. In a survey released on Dec 13, it shows “that 71% of respondents admitted that their company is not tracking downtime with any quantified metric related to its cost to the company. So, a majority of businesses do not know the cost of downtime until an incident occurs.”

The survey, conducted by industry research firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), targeted more than 250 IT decision makers in North America and Western Europe on topics such as application downtime, recovery time objectives, the use of virtualization, high availability, and fault tolerant availability solutions.

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The IT meets Operational Technologies (OT) debate has been receiving a lot of attention in 2016, but new approaches, such as virtualization allows manufacturers to keep production running during downtime incidents. According to the survey, “the vast majority of production servers and services are not intended to tolerate the length of an average unplanned downtime incident, which was 87 minutes.” For organizations with critical business applications, each minute of unplanned downtime can have severe repercussions on the company, from lost revenue to not meeting service level agreements (SLAs) to brand reputation damage.

In a recent case application from Stratus Technologies, the company cited the ability for its everRun software to provide a mining operation redundancy abilities for Rockwell Automation’s Software Maintenance Automation Control Center (RSMACC). The maintenance software provides a single point of access for gathering, analyzing, and managing control system information across the enterprise.

For this application, Stratus’s redundant software “can synchronize two standard Microsoft Windows servers to create a virtual application environment that runs a single license of RSMACC on both servers simultaneously.”

For more information on software redundancy or the survey, visit www.stratus.com.

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