The Always-On App: Fighting Application Downtime to Keep Your Business Moving

Nine to five may be the hours you spend in your office (if you’re lucky), but it no longer describes a business workday. That’s because today’s organizations don’t close at night. Applications that power actions as diverse and common as mobile banking, ride sharing, flight booking, online shopping and invoice inquiries can’t shut down at 5 p.m. That means application downtime—whether planned or unplanned—can cost your organization money, time and resources. When it comes to ensuring a good customer experience, then, and maintaining the health of your business, application downtime is the enemy.

Unfortunately, at first glance, solving issues of application downtime can be daunting. Applications rely on so many moving parts, from server hardware to networking components to software services. Yelling at an application vendor won’t help. But working with SUSE probably can. That’s because SUSE provides the foundation of enterprise infrastructure. Solving issues of application downtime is just part of what it takes to become a nonstop IT shop, a goal we’re helping organizations with every day.

You can’t address application downtime without looking at your infrastructure holistically. Traditionally, different pieces of hardware (servers, switches, disk arrays, etc.) have limited what your infrastructure can do. These pieces have always been connected, but they had to be managed individually, which has never given IT departments the control they want. Today, more and more functionality is happening in the software. This software-defined infrastructure (SDI) approach acknowledges the connections in your data centers—and gives you the tools to manage them.

At SUSE, we believe that a move to SDI can best help organizations tackle the availability and access demands they face today. We’ve long believed that making software more reliable, flexible and easier to manage makes it better at supporting the applications that run your business. Our SDI solutions enable IT to drive innovation with greater agility, easier automation and reduced costs. They offer flexibility and efficiency so you can improve time to market while ensuring service availability. All so that customers and employees can access applications any time they need them.

One of the pieces of our software-defined infrastructure approach is SUSE® Linux Enterprise Live Patching. It allows you to apply critical kernel patches without interrupting the operating system for even a second. In the world of application availability, that’s huge. You can keep your operating system up to date for security purposes without interrupting the apps you rely on.

Just as important is ensuring that your servers are arranged in resilient clusters to help ensure availability. SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension and Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension can do just that. By building server clusters with automated failover, you create a rock-solid foundation for your applications, so a small issue in one server is unnoticed by your apps or the people who rely on them. By linking those clusters across long distances using rules-based failovers, you further insulate yourself from regional disasters and other issues. Ciclum Farma, the Portuguese drug manufacturer, achieved 100 percent uptime for its mission-critical SAP solutions using the SUSE high-availability tool.

Your customers and employees are out there relying on your services day in and day out. Your applications must be available to them. Luckily, with a software-defined infrastructure approach powered by SUSE, you can build a solid foundation for all the moving parts that keep applications available. And that reliability means that even though your apps can’t work only a 9 to 5, maybe your IT team can.

Check out SUSE’s solutions for Business Critical computing @ https://www.suse.com/programs/business-critical/ .

Jeff.Reser@suse.com

@JeffReserNC