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Saturday, November 22, 2008
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Network downtime continues to wreak havoc for companies

Network downtime causes many IT executives to wake in a cold sweat, and while technologies advance, the nightmare continues to become reality in many companies.

Survey results released by Avocent at VMworld 2008 this week revealed that network downtime continues to create problems for a majority of some 300 executives and IT managers polled. For instance, 86% of companies stated that any unplanned downtime causes a business issue and an average of 12% reported losing employee productivity due to those unplanned events. More worrisome, another 35% stated they had lost mission-critical data due to unplanned downtime.

As for the frequency of downtime, 43% of companies said that they experience, on average, up to five unplanned downtime events per month. Of those, 17% experienced two to four hours of collective unplanned downtime per month, mostly attributed to hardware or power failures.

"Business continuity, in the form of network uptime, i s a constant challenge for those polled," an Avocent press release reads. "There are potentially significant costs tied to downtime including disgruntled or lost customers, reduced worker productivity and reduced revenues tied to network failure."

And no wonder..

Useful answer?
0

And it will continue as long as the "IT executives" buy snake oil, forget that reliability is strategy and design instead of tools, toys, and cheap labor, etc. Sorry, not much sympathy from me today - seen too many companies and corporations totally lost today when it comes to reliability, capacity and security.

30+ years designing and building 24x7 systems, often global, has proven, at least for me, that no money, vendor tool or toy, or adding to headcount can replace good strategy and design. And always gets more expensive and more difficult on long run! The world is full of examples - why not to learn from those?

Maybe next time use an experienced architect instead of some dog and pony show brochure, "expert" writeup from a vendor supported research, a nice presentation from some marketing person or a PC magazine when making decisions? Might give better sleep?

RE: And no wonder...

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Couldn't have said it better myself. In every one of the three Fortune 500s I have worked for Mgmt has been the cause of most all of the underlying design/architecture issues. Wether forcing the use of specific vendors in every situation or wasting 100s of thousands on Network Assesments by outside consultants that just confirm what the employess have already pointed out.

Botton line you can't outsource this ..!..

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About Denise Dubie

Dubie is a senior editor at Network World.

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The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.

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