Every Strong Customer Application Is Backed by a Healthy Server

Your customer has been trying to get your application to work for about 10 minutes. But the application just won’t load since your main server is experiencing power-related downtime. As a result, the customer can’t complete his or her order. 

What will your customer do as a result of your application downtime? Chances are likely that he or she will seek out a competitor that can provide a working application. This means your company will lose out on this business transaction, and potentially the customer’s trust in your company.

As this example proves, uptime should be a primary focus of your data center. If your business-critical servers aren’t functioning, your bottom line will be directly affected. That is, your customer-facing application is only as strong as the network infrastructure that powers it.

How can you ensure the maximum uptime of your business-critical servers, and also your applications? You need the ability to observe the health of every one of your servers. It’s pretty rare, in other words, for a server to completely fail out of the blue. Oftentimes, servers are the victims of a “slow death,” which can occur from any of the following issues:

• Prolonged environmental exposure: Suppose you leave your data center on Friday and return on Monday to find out that your heater or air conditioning unit broke. Exposing your servers to extreme temperatures for a long period of time could greatly impact their health and performance.
• Data overload: You may have one particular server that’s been carrying a heavy workload for a long time and simply crashes due to overuse.  
• Old age: Every server has a limited lifespan. If you’ve been using your servers for several years, you need to keep a close watch on them so that you can spot issues ahead of time that could potentially lead to downtime.