The force creating change is the urgent need to keep the network on-line and data accessible to the users because downtime causes significant productivity losses and measurable costs. Millions of dollars in annual downtime losses are not uncommon today because distributed networks were not designed for mission critical applications like mainframe data centers. Keeping the network available and the applications continuously in operation, is the absolute top priority for network administration. Downtime sensitivity creates business reasons for companies to invest in network infrastructure, storage and system fault-tolerance, and management processes. Maintaining high network availability is now the top priority of network administrators and corporate IT managers.
Downtime is unacceptable for mission-critical applications.
This is causing a strong trend to rearchitect and reengineer the distributed network. These dynamics are driving new investment in building mission-critical capable networks. Recentralization brings server and storage consolidation. Network administrators discover they need fewer points of failure as well as more robust systems. They respond by deploying high-end servers and building storage servers as shared resources.