
Chapter 5. Availability 107
5.7 Summary
Being “available” is the state of an application being accessible to the end user.
The ideal for availability is 100% of the time. Businesses can no longer tolerate
downtime from software and hardware errors, or even from system upgrades.
There is no way to totally avoid failures in any single component, but there are
ways to lessen the impact of these failures. Redundancy, error detection and
recovery, as well as continuous monitoring of critical resources, are some of the
ways to achieve high availability. To handle situations where hardware outages
are unavoidable, and to provide for vertical expansion ...