High availability motivation

Architecting highly availability systems is not new. They are, in fact, commonplace in industries such as financial. However, many recent events have heightened interests and requirements in availability:

• Catastrophic events such as September 11, 2001 or the Northeast Power Blackout of 2003 have pushed availability to the foreground. Situations that were unimaginable five years ago are now a serious part of business continuity planning. In fact, many corporate managers reject business continuity plans that do not incorporate wide scale disasters.
• Emerging regulations are forcing availability. In the health care industry, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates business continuity and availability planning. Section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley specifies that corporations must protect the systems used to report financial information. At a minimum, corporations are forced to think about the ability to recover those systems.
• Your corporation may be part of a supply chain where inventory needs to be available just-in-time. You may demand or are demanded by your partners to have your systems available to ensure that business partners can communicate. In some situations, trading partners may demand business continuity plans or disaster recovery plans ensuring that services can be restored within a set period of time after catastrophes.