We should be aware that there is no technology that’s completely reliable. Downtime is an important factor related to server reliability. It is used to indicate planned and unplanned termination of service. Just like other electronic devices, servers will need to be switched off or they will be switched off due to various reasons. Businesses may lose money if the downtime rate is too high. Downtime can be minimized by using fault tolerant servers.

Many servers are essentially fault tolerant, but it doesn’t mean that there will be no downtime. 99.9 percent uptime guarantee may seem like a good deal; but it means that in one year; there will 14 hours of downtime period. For 99.99 percent uptime guarantee, there will be 90 minutes of downtime period in one year.

We should know whether that amount of downtime guarantee is appropriate for our situation. As an example, websites that provide content for the audience to read; could handle standard annual downtime. However, high-traffic e-commerce websites may need higher uptime guarantee, possibly at 99.999 percent to ensure near continuous availability. By having high uptime, we could ensure higher profitability and improved productivity.

Reliability problems could also be caused by crashes and instability. It means that the server should have all the proper upgrades, updates and patches. However, it is also possible that these updates could cause additional problems. In this situation, we will need to rollback to previous configuration. Before fully deploying an upgrade, it should be tested by a special department for a period of time in test servers. This will ensure that servers have high degree of reliability.

Remote management is something that can help to improve reliability. Administrators could perform light maintenance tasks on the server from distant locations. Servers may also have hot swappable hard drives and this allows the transfer for files to be performed in much faster way. There are many ways we can improve the capability of a server and we should make sure that the overall downtime can be significantly reduced.

As said previously, no electronic devices can last forever and they will eventually fail. However, we should be able to minimize downtime. In essence, we can’t let the competition to have much better server solutions.

In this case, we should avoid solutions that are based on unreliable, expensive and slow servers. We should have the proper equipments to let everything work properly. It may also mean that we should have the proper financial resources that can help to expand the IT infrastructure of our company. Good servers will restore faith on our data center and its excellent reliability.

Data center should be maintained properly and this is the only way we can significantly reduce downtime. There should be enough redundancy and we need to make sure that the data center can handle huge transfer of data at long period of time. Common sense has significant effects in ensuring that our data center can work well.