Compaq

Reliability: The Ultimate Mission-Critical Mandate
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Downtime Costs Millions
Those are important questions, especially considering how costly high availability has become in this Internet age. When AT&T had outages in April 1998 due to software upgrades, the cost was $40 million in rebates, according to the Gartner Group. When E*trade's had outages in early 1999 because of system upgrades, the firm's stock price plunged. "The stock hit a high of $66 7/16, then tumbled to about $35 amid concerns about repeated technical glitches at the on-line brokerage," USA Today reported. Those price tags don't even take into account such intangibles as reputation damage.

The good news is that while the cost of downtime is increasing, the cost of avoiding downtime is falling dramatically, according to the Gartner Group. "It used to be that a customer would call and expect us to get back in a couple of hours," says Peter O'Neill, manager of Compaq's bBusiness cCritical sServices for North America based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. "WithIn our Pplatinum Sservices, the minimum response time is 15 minutes. Because of the Internet explosion, we even have mom and pops buying our business critical services."

Experts say availability must be aligned with business needs, requires a clear methodology, needs to be modeled, cover all risks, and demands continuous assessment. "Availability has to be designed into your architecture, not just into someone else's operating system," FactSet's Zorn says.

This is precisely the tack that Compaq takes. Compaq provides a full range of business critical services, from helping firms design their infrastructure, to troubleshooting applications, to ensuringe the uninterrupted service demanded by customers in a 24x7 world.
Compaq's holistic approach involves understanding a firm's business requirements, auditing existing infrastructure, selecting and assessing technology, implementing management practices, integrating services, producing availability baselines, and monitoring and improving those systems.

Companies have turned to Compaq to complete more than 20,000 enterprise network projects, Internet solutions for more than 1,000 enterprise customers, and 400 major EDI supply chain solutions.

The first all-electronic exchange in the United States, the International Securities Exchange (ISE), used the Compaq Value-Added Implementation Service to build its system and pre-stage it in Compaq's facilities, dramatically reducing onsite installation time. The ISE selected Compaq GlobalCustomer Service's premier Gold Support -- which provides 24x7 service with a response time of 30 minutes or less than two hours -- to ensure business continuity. ISE wanted a single point of accountability for all its service, hardware, and software.

Cheaper Than Downtime
"Some customers are initially dissuaded that they buy a $50,000 system and then are asked to spend the same amount on services over a couple of years," Compaq's O'Neill says. "But when they you take the time to calculate the cost of downtime for even an hour, the services suddenly seem like a fairly minimal cost."

Federal TransTel Inc. (FTT) in Birmingham, Alabama, which offers turnkey billing services for the telecommunications industry, turned to Compaq to help plan its basic infrastructure. "When dealing with high availability, vendor selection is critical, more so than in other areas," says Ken Grammer, manager of systems support for FTT. "You are dealing with a concept of computing that is considerablely more complicated than simply build a machine, throw software on it, monitor it, tune it, and watch it run."

For instance, large databases must be configured to properly fail over in ways that don't lead to larger problems, such as database corruption. "Anybody that maintains large databases knows that anytime a machine comes down they could encounter an anomaly that creates data corruption," Grammer says. "I can't speak highly enough of the job that Compaq did. They held our hand during the process and answered all our questions."

Compaq's O'Neill notes that many firms bypass best practices that ensure high availability, such as solid systems management practices in change control. "You can't have an operator make changes in the middle of the night without proper documentation," O'Neill says. "Some customers don't appreciate that you can't make a change on a live system and expect everything to go smoothly."(next)

 

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