One of the challenges in running an IT shop is finding time in the day to actually do your work. Most of our clients are pressed for time, and their workdays stretch on and on into the evenings. One answer is to make as much of your IT base nonstop, so that there are no outages. The least productive use of your time is reactive time–when the schedules go to hell while you grapple with the unanticipated. No outages means that there’s a lot less grappling time and a lot more scheduled; more productive time.
Of course making IT nonstop whatever happens also has some other benefits, like increased productivity for the organization at large. And it’s easier to schedule upgrades and changes, since they don’t have to be planned into downtime windows or done in the middle of the night. And now IT can be freed a bit from infrastructure management and elevated to other pursuits, like planning how to use IT to further the organization’s business.
The good news is that it’s possible–and, in fact easy–to make networks, storage, computing and application service nonstop nowadays. We have had some pretty interesting advances on all fronts lately that make this available for a very modest cost. And it’s also possible to do it incrementally, so that the more critical bits of IT can be migrated into the nonstop realm first. It’s probably worth checking out, if you haven’t done that yet.
