RESEARCH PAPER: Software Defined Availability (SDA)- Critical for Managing Datacenter Scale

Many people think about web and cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) as “always available”. However, these services have poor availability compared to the high availability (HA) and fault tolerant (FT) IT services that are deployed for processes that must not fail. An example of a process that must not fail—handled by FT systems—is that part of the credit card transaction flow where one bank has subtracted funds but the other

bank hasn’t added them yet. Processes like these have tended to run on expensive, explicitly HA hardware. Now, the massively-replicated hardware infrastructure underlying hyperscale services has the potential to lower the cost of HA solutions. Lower costs can be achieved by shifting the focus away from expensive, explicitly HA hardware toward mainstream commercial hardware with software-based availability.

Executive Summary
Moving from Uptime to Downtime and Availability
Hardware Deployed at Scale Fails at Scale
“Software Defined” is an Abstract Concept
Software Defined Availability: How it Works
Conclusion
Table 1: Availability vs. Unavailability

You can download the paper here.

Companies Referenced:

Amazon
Baidu
Facebook
Google
Microsoft
Netflix
Stratus
Tencent
VMware

Patrick Moorhead

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Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights) in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.