Continuous Availability

Mission Critical businesses such as the majority of trading systems in the City are faced with the critical need to ensure the availability and continuous operation of their business systems.

We need to make this happen in spite of potential failures ranging from disk crashes and CPU failures to catastrophic losses of the computing facilities or communications networks. While solutions exist to provide tolerance to component failure, the issue of catastrophic failures i.e. a failure that results in the production host being totally out of action needs to be looked at in view of new technical possibilities and recent experiences post September 11th.

We know that trading Products are inter-linked across the globe. We need to provide current information to business on a 24x7basis.

 

Following recent experiences, there is currently a great demand from the Business Managers (as opposed to IT) that most trading systems across the globe must be able to function independently of each other in different geographical locations. In simple term this means inter-linked hubs functioning as a logical unit globally but capable of carrying on independently on their own (i.e. provide full functionality to the business), if a hub or a number of hubs get out of action. This does happen!