By Marvin Huffaker
Downtime Costs
Every company is different, and numerous factors
are involved in calculating the cost of downtime.
But if your
business is unable to process orders, collect
payments,
process
transactions, service your customers, or otherwise
run your business, it is costing you too much.
Furthermore, you SHOULD NOT
have to accept downtime as a routine business activity.
Common Source of Problems
Although downtime can occur for many different
reasons, there are a handful
of core
issues that are frequently identified as
the cause of many ongoing problems. These apply mostly to Novell NetWare servers, but could also apply to other systems as well.
- NetWare servers that are configured with default
settings and are not tuned for optimum performance
and efficiency.
- NetWare servers that are displaying
error conditions or system abends, and the errors
are left unresolved.
- Errors in NDS that are preventing proper replica
synchronization.
- NDS Partition and replica structure that is
configured poorly.
- NetWare servers that are not configured correctly
for their intended function.
Take Action NOw
Many of the things that can be done to reduce downtime are complex and could take years of training and experience to fully understand and master. Many inexperienced systems administrators 'fight fires' on a daily basis because they don't understand the concepts that are required for running a stable system. But if your business is being negatively impacted
by system downtime, here are a few things you can do to help turn things around:
- Perform an NDS health check. Review, identify, and resolve any
NDS synchronization issues and any other error conditions that are found.
- Perform a server health check. Check the system log files. Review, identify, and resolve any critical
system errors and abends.
- Optimize your NDS Partition
and Replica structure for your environment.
- Review your system performance and optimize as needed. Generally speaking, a default server configuration is not optimized.
- Learn how to resolve system problems without reinstalling
the server. Reinstalling a server should be a rare occasion and NOT a normal troubleshooting process.
- Observe the performance and stability of your server and note areas that could be further improved or optimized.
- Keep baselines of key statistics like system utilization, cache performance, etc.
- Don't use a reboot as a fix-all. Rebooting only delays a problem but hardly ever fixes it.
- Don't be afraid to call in the experts if you get in over your head or need an extra pair of eyes to assess your situation.
About Marvin Huffaker Consulting
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc. specializes in Novell solutions and support. If you need help restoring uptime in your organization, give us a call at 1-888-690-0013 for guaranteed results. You can also find additional contact info here. |
