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Always ticking

Companies rewind downtime clocks

by Scott Steinberg

OPERATING A BUSINESS WITHIN a global marketplace is more challenging than ever. Only companies with constant access to information are succeeding, but they're doing so with little time for the type of maintenance that requires downtime.

Constant access means maintenance, upgrades and performance tuning must be completed without taking the system out of operation. Teradata's Customer Service specialists around the world are ready to help smooth out the disparity between the need for continued data flow and regular business downtime.

"In years past the discussion was about keeping the system running, but that is not enough," explains Patricia Rudolf, Teradata's director of services management and marketing. "As uptime nears 99.999%, the focus is shifting from pure uptime to system degradation. Solutions such as dual systems and Teradata Priority Scheduler give us creative ways to meet customers' service level agreements and still perform critical service operations."

In an era of 24/7 commercial applications, assumptions regarding maintenance windows are rapidly becoming obsolete. Even planned downtime can prove prohibitively expensive. In a September 2003 survey, Gartner, Inc. found that corporations lose upward of $100,000 on average per hour-long outage. Accordingly, the six-hour window most IT operations currently allow on one Sunday morning a month is dwindling fast as firms shift to active data warehousing or a real-time enterprise.

Recognizing those issues, the Customer Services group keeps pace with the field of analytics as it evolves. The team's proactive stance toward incident management and problem solving allows it to address the demanding needs of today's data warehousing environment.

Clients wouldn't have it any other way. For a major manufacturer looking to limit planned downtime to once every four to six months or a retail giant operating under stringent service level agreements, personal commitments are the backbone of a successful initiative. That's why Teradata's business practices combine human-touch solutions with best-of-breed technology.

Teradata Customer Service representatives convene with a client's administrative staff on a monthly basis to appraise the existing enterprise environment, plot out implementation plans, define backup plans and schedule upgrades as required. Afterward, technology comes into play.

"The Parallel Upgrade Tool (PUT) minimizes lapses in service by simultaneously installing software across multiple Teradata nodes or systems," says Craig James, Teradata service product manager. PUT automates and expedites the upgrade process to significantly decrease the time it takes to complete the project. As a result, downtime has been reduced.

Engineers are also making progress in the field of service administration through Customer Care Link (CCL). By collecting event and state data from system components, automatically identifying problem conditions and notifying Customer Services, problems are quickly diagnosed and resolved. Data cross-correlations are also processed in order to predict and prevent faults and errors before they even occur. CCL addresses both hardware and database issues.

Ultimately, Teradata's Customer Services solutions enable its clients to approach near 100% uptime when necessary and to reduce downtime to an absolute minimum. "Every minute of service interruption is a minute wasted insofar as we're concerned," says Rudolf. "A healthy system is an active system, period." T

Scott Steinberg's articles have appeared in Wired, Popular Science and Rolling Stone.

ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC MUELLER