Unplanned outages are costly – so tell me something I don’t know!
Downtime is no longer an option
Can you remember the last time you put Netflix on and had to wait more than 30 seconds before you were having a healthy debate about whether it was going to be The Crown or Stranger Things tonight? No, neither can we. Services need to be available 24/7, it’s expected, it’s the norm and anything less is likely to cause serious issues for any organisation. A planned outage is bad enough but an unplanned outage can have far reaching consequences.
Have you ever tried googling “calculate the cost of downtime”? Well, we have and there were 783,000 results. There’s research upon research about how much any kind of IT outage is going to cost your organisation. Estimates range from £70,000 an hour to over £40 million in a year. We’re not just talking monetary costs of course. Let us not forget the bad press and damage to your brand, the loss of confidence from customers, data loss, regulatory compliance issues…the list is pretty extensive. We know it, you know it. The 783,000 results in Google know it, so what can we actually do about it?
Proactive Vs Reactive
Where does your organisation sit? Of course all organisations strive to sit in the “proactive” camp. However, we understand that this isn’t always easy. In the world of DB2 maintenance, especially for mid-market organisations, DBA skills are often spread too thinly. Expert DBA skills are often needed on different projects and so DBAs can find themselves spending more time on non-core functions.
Proactive monitoring takes away the concern of problems cropping up unexpectedly. With proactive monitoring potential issues get picked up and dealt with before users are even aware of an issue. However, with conflicting internal priorities, proactive monitoring for internal teams can be a tough nut to crack. Triton Consulting provides a remote database support service called RemoteDBA. Triton has developed a stable and secure process for the cost-effective management of all components of your DB2 infrastructure.
Find out more; download our Top 5 reasons for choosing Remote Database Support info sheet.
We don’t need support, what’s the worst that can happen?
Yes, of course you could carry on “getting by” and avoiding those unplanned outages but chances are it will happen at some point….and then what? We’ve seen our fair share of DB2 support nightmare scenarios.
You can take a look through them here. We wouldn’t recommend this as bedtime reading though, there are a few which really prove to be the stuff of nightmares!
One of the worst incidences we have seen involved a broken database on an unsupported version of DB2, with no backups or log files to recover the database. Those with a sensitive disposition look away now! The customer in question did not have any kind of remote support or proactive monitoring in place.
Things started with an erroneous script which had deleted a few transaction log files that had a ‘last changed’ date of more than 45 days. The same script had caused other errors and a database restart was required, but the database did not start. The database was looking for an old log file, which had just been deleted by the script. As the policy was to retain the backups and archive logs for 30 days, this log file was deleted from the archive logs too.
The database was vital to the organisation, with a number of web facing apps relying on it.
To make matters worse, the version of DB2 in use had passed its “End of Service” date. When we were called in a few hours after the incident, panic had set in.
To cut a fairly long and painful story short we are happy to report that after a few hiccups and 15 hrs of db2dart, import/load, runstats and data fixes, the database was available for the application. The database was down for more than 20 hours, but it was back in once piece with almost no data loss. Quite an achievement under the circumstances!
So it was a happy(ish) ending but the organisation still had a database that was down for 20 HOURS! That’s pretty shocking and not a situation that any database team wants to find themselves in.
Take the pressure off with RemoteDBA from Triton Consulting. We provide the highest level of stability for business critical operations. Find out more https://www.triton.co.uk/db2-support/ or give us a call on 44 (0) 870 2411 550