Managed Availability – keeping your business running

Businesses do not like to be interrupted. Anything that prevents or delays the minute-by-minute processes of your business operations can result directly in lost revenues or tarnished reputation. This is especially true of customer-facing operations, such as your web site.

High availability of critical infrastructure systems has become a cornerstone of successful businesses, but achieving it takes specialist skills and resources. Computacenter's Managed Availability service takes on the responsibility for keeping your systems running at maximum performance.
“We give the customer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.97 per cent availability,” explains Neil Meddick, remote services director at Computacenter. “This is end to end infrastructure management, up to, and including, the operating system.”

The capabilities and business processes supported by these systems range across the spectrum of applications – the choice of which systems to manage this way is obviously up to the individual customer. Typically, though, they will be the most business-critical and are frequently customer-facing systems such as web sites.

The systems that Computacenter manages can be at the customer's site or – a very popular option – hosted off-site at a co-location facility. Either way, the systems are monitored and managed remotely around the clock by skilled analysts working from Computacenter's Service Operations Centre in Hatfield, utilising state of the art tools Achieving high availability depends greatly on having the right infrastructure in the first place. If a customer wants this service on an existing system, Computacenter will carry out an audit to assess its suitability, and whether it meets blueprinted Managed Availability architecture requirements. If it does, Computacenter will take the infrastructure into service. If not, a solutions architect will recommend an upgrade path to meet the required hardware and software standards.

“We have an excellent grasp of the kind of infrastructure that is capable of high availability,” says Meddick. “We can advise on improvements that may need to be made, or for new systems we can provide a number of pre-templated solutions that we know can deliver the necessary performance.”
Continuous monitoring of the customer's infrastructure enables Computacenter to acquire a very detailed understanding of the system, and aside from the immediate benefit of ensuring system availability from moment to moment, this has two significant advantages.

First, it allows Computacenter to anticipate problems and work with the customer to avoid them. “We might notice, for example, that a particular operation, such as a batch process, is starting to consume ever-greater amounts of processor capacity,” says Meddick. “We can advise the customer on what to do to avoid the system capacity becoming overloaded.”
The other benefit is that this service helps build a detailed picture of the capacity and capabilities of the system which can be invaluable in planning for and rolling out new applications. As part of that, Computacenter is usually a participating member of the customer's Change Acceptance Board (CAB) and helps with implementing good IT service management disciplines across the customer's infrastructure. “Often our customers don’t have their own change management best practice, or even a CAB. In those circumstances we will set up the board for them, and apply our best practice to the change process,” says Meddick. That can be especially helpful to a customer that is outsourcing application development because it provides valuable information and additional control in its management of its application partners.
“We can supply detailed information for our customers that is used in scaling the infrastructure appropriately to meet both current needs and those of new systems coming online,” says Meddick.

That same information is equally valuable when planning for less predictable problems. Managed Availability has a significant role to play in Business Continuity Planning for Computacenter’s customers because the understanding the system it provides gives an excellent picture of what might happen in various unusual circumstances.

As part of the Managed Availability service, the process also includes making backups of certain data at the most appropriate times, and carrying out scheduled restores. All of this is focused on one goal – ensuring that whatever happens, your ICT systems will be there to support your business.