ABSTRACT
Recognizing the growing importance of reliability to business, platform vendors have begun to make claims about reliability. A platform with a lengthy mean time to repair can result in long downtimes, even though failures are infrequent. The Transaction Performance Processing Council-C Benchmark considers the five-year cost of ownership rather than simple purchase price. This benchmark cannot accurately predict an individual company’s precise costs, but it does illustrate the relative costs of different platforms. Increasing availability in products not designed for availability is expensive and difficult to manage. Availability involves both hardware and software. The complex task of designing systems with data integrity starts at the chip level, extends through memory to the processor, down the data paths, and all the way out to the storage media. Downtime and lack of data integrity are expensive — and are becoming more so as businesses conduct more business online.
