Your Resources For Business Continuity And Minimizing Downtime

Leveraging a VMware-based Virtual Data Center with cutting-edge NSX network services-- sometimes referred to as a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) or Virtual Data Center (VDC) approach--can help your organization increase uptime, limit downtime and maximize resource availability. The result: improved operational efficiencies and lower costs. Here’s a look at how VMware reduces downtime and what that means for your bottom line.

Going Down?

Downtime costs money and frustrates employees. Recent survey data found that per-minute downtime costs have been rising steadily for almost a decade, now topping $8,800. What’s more, 41 percent of employees cited downtime as their “most significant irritant” in the workplace — no surprise since offline servers, in-house or in the cloud, mean staff can’t complete critical tasks. 

The cause doesn’t matter. While planned downtime comes with advance notice, it still cripples employee efficacy. Unplanned downtime, meanwhile, adds a secondary layer of uncertainty. When will servers be available again? How long will tasks go unfinished?

How VMware-Based Virtual Data Center Reduces Downtime

A VMware-based Virtual Data Center platform with NSX services offers multiple features to help organizations reduce downtime, including:

• High availability — Downtime happens. Despite best efforts, unexpected events such as power failures or data center disasters can cause service outages. VMware high availability (HA) gets virtual machines back up as quickly as possible by leveraging multiple ESXi hosts as a cluster, allowing virtual machines to be restarted on other hosts in the cluster and continually monitoring virtual machines (VMs) for failure. No additional software is required. HA automatically protects all connected workloads.
• Fault tolerance — VMware also helps reduce unplanned downtime with robust fault tolerance. By ensuring both primary and secondary VMs are continually operating in identical states, any failure detected in either results in immediate and seamless failover. This enables problems to be identified and contained without impacting operations.
• Dynamic workload movement — VMware also can help limit planned outages — which typically account for 80 percent of all data center downtime — by dynamically moving workloads to different physical servers. Leveraging the NSX service capabilities allows enterprises to significantly reduce planned downtime without sacrificing needed maintenance or upgrades.
• ESXi host optimizations — Steadfast Simplicity Cloud Services also include VMware ESXi host optimizations to help reduce unplanned downtime. Shared storage eliminates single points of failure by sharing virtual machine files across Fibre Channel, iSCSI or NAS storage solutions, while network interface teaming prevents single card failures from crippling compute resources. Finally, storage multipathing ensures that storage path failures don’t result in unexpected downtime.

Optimizing Operational Benefits

Beyond costs and employee satisfaction, ensuring maximum uptime via a VMware-based Virtual Data Center platform offers other operational benefits:

• Enhanced compliance — If protected personal or financial data is suddenly inaccessible, compliance chain-of-custody may be compromised. Enhanced uptime means reduced compliance risk.
• Improved security — When cloud services go down, employees may leverage insecure workarounds to complete critical tasks, opening your organization to increased security risk. Reliable access results in better network defense.
• Extended usability — Unexpected, unmanaged downtime puts increased pressure on in-house server stacks and legacy solutions, in turn reducing their functional lifespan and increasing total costs. Extend usability with better downtime control.

Deliver Reduced Downtime With Steadfast

Steadfast Simplicity Cloud Services deliver enterprise-level private and hybrid solutions for companies of any size. Built on the foundation of VMware software and NSX network virtualization, Steadfast does the heavy lifting, minimizing both planned and unplanned downtime to maximize your IT impact.

Discover how VMware reduces downtime with the Steadfast Simplicity Cloud Services. Let’s talk.