Providing Open Architecture High Availability Solutions

3.6 Making it All Work — Open vs. Proprietary

The overarching goal of this high availability framework is to provide an open system environment

in which multiple vendors can participate in providing system services that help achieve the

expected level of availability in the systems we design. Today, systems are far too large and

complex to expect that a single vendor can provide all of the functionality required of a system.

Inevitably, you will depend on the services of other vendors to realize your system. By providing

an open system framework, we can expect the dynamics of an industry to align with an initiative to

provide interoperable services that can participate in a controlled and uniform manner. This is what

is alternatively achieved if you were to do it all yourself (or via contract) in a proprietary system.

The uniformity gained by providing a common framework provides a significant reduction in

complexity of otherwise integrating disparate components and services.

By providing an open system approach to building high availability systems we can expect that all

parties can benefit from the reduced deployment impedance of providing HA systems. Faster time-

to-market can be realized via the use of widely available and reusable services that participate in a

framework that will encourage the maturity and growth of system services providing increased

reliability. Through such a framework, it is expected that the participation of such components and

services will provide the ability to scale or grade the performance and reliability to meet the needs

of the system designer. By formally managing the participation of these otherwise disparate

technologies from multiple vendors, we can expect to see improved reliability growth as they

participate in a prescribed manner, limiting the usage profile to a tractable set of use cases. This

gives a higher level of confidence in the validation tests that qualify these services before their

deployment. This will result in fewer faults in the field, providing more profitable products, and

much happier consumers.