As some of you may already know, my company offers a premium email solution that is extremely popular with small business and enterprise clients. I have blogged about Pleth’s premium email solutions from time to time here on this blog as well. About a month or so ago I was contacted by Drew Robb, a freelance writer for computer world, processor, and a few other tech publications to answer a few questions in regards to email uptime. I just checked processor.com’s website today and found that the article has been published, it’s a great piece and I thought that I would post it here as well as a link to the actual article: Processor Editorial Article – Ensure Email Uptime
Keeping up with email can be time-consuming and tedious. Spam takes the joy out of it. Its abuse in organizations leads to a constant bombardment of irrelevance that tends to bury worthwhile messages.
But while we may have a hard time living with it, we definitely can’t live without it in today’s business world. According to a new study by Osterman Research, email is rated as the most important tool in getting work done in small to medium-sized enterprises, well ahead of the mobile phone, desktop phone, and instant messaging.
That survey showed the average user sends and receives about 140 emails per workday. Employees estimated that email accounts for close to 80% of their total information transmission. Unfortunately, more than half of SMEs suffer from regular email outages and slowdowns. To make matters worse, it’s the user community that tends to notice first and bring the matter to the attention of IT.
“In the absence of good monitoring solutions, there really isn’t any other way to tell if email is down than by relying on users or an IT staffer noticing that email throughput has dropped to zero, a server is no longer operating, etc.” says Michael Osterman, an analyst at Osterman Research.
A variety of monitoring tools are available to help SMEs keep an eye on email uptime. According to Osterman, SMEs should look for monitoring products that address three aspects of downtime: detection, troubleshooting, and remediation.
“If it takes 15 minutes for the IT department to detect a problem, relying on users to find the problem, and one minute for the monitoring system to detect and alert IT (via email, IM, mobile phone, etc.), that saves 14 minutes per incident,” he says. “Assuming one downtime incident per month, the monitoring system would save two hours, 48 minutes of downtime each year. If a downtime occurs on a weekend, the detection/alert process can take a lot longer.”
Osterman recommends that companies in the SME category that rely on the near real-time nature of email invest in a monitoring system. For those organizations that don’t depend on email so heavily, particularly for transaction processing and the like, he believes that monitoring is not as critical.
99.999%Blah Blah
One problem that SMEs will face when they go to select an email monitoring or recovery solution is that just about every vendor will promise 99.999% uptime. But how many can actually deliver it?
“So many providers today can’t deliver 99.99% uptime because they aren’t completely utilizing technologies like virtualization or clustering,” says Cotton Rohrscheib, a partner and co-founder of www.pleth.com). “I think that in a lot of cases by offering this 99.99% uptime guarantee, service providers are more or less mimicking their competition.”
Rohrscheib feels that 99.9% uptime or more has become a buzzphrase that everybody utilizes to promote their services. However, the products may not live up to the marketing hype. As well as a failure to harness virtualization and clustering technologies, he feels that cost is probably a major factor in this. Additionally, he cites the learning curve for virtualization, which can limit its widespread deployment.
So IT administrators should question anyone offering 99.9% or more email uptime on several fronts: how exactly this is guaranteed in logical terms that encompass the technologies involved; how that guarantee is to be measured and monitored; and what the consequences are if it isn’t met in terms of SLAs (service-level agreements).
Business Continuity Safeguards
But monitoring email, server architecture, and SLAs are only part of the email uptime equation. Another vital aspect is business continuity. While disaster recovery deals with recovering after a failure, business continuity is all about staying up and keeping systems functioning despite a major failure.
The last thing you want, with email in particular, is to have to recover systems from backup tapes or even from disk. No matter how good the disaster recovery system, downtime is inevitable. By deploying business continuity appliances, however, email applications such as Exchange can survive an act of God or a server crash without going down.
“The best strategy SME IT managers can employ is not to improve email uptime but rather to solve or bring an end to email downtime [due] to planned and unplanned outages,” says Andréa Skov, vice president of marketing at Teneros (www.pleth.com). “The mean time between failures was only somewhat better than commodity hardware, although the high-end server hardware was many times more expensive. For the same cost, key services are now spread across large numbers of commodity servers in single-purpose clusters. Our experience has shown this greatly reduces the risk that any service might become unavailable to our customers, in turn giving our clients a higher likelihood of uptime in their email services and less likelihood of downtime.”
Questions or Comments?