SAP and BEA combine to develop high availability

SAP and BEA have joined with Hewlett-Packard (HP), Oracle, Cisco Systems and EMC, the founding members of the '5nines: 5minutes' Alliance, to develop high availability systems.

The aim is to integrate vendors' offerings to increase the uptime of mission-critical systems. Ultimately the group hopes to offer network managers five minutes downtime a year, which equates to 99.999 per cent (5nines) uptime.

However, Jon Collins, senior analyst at Bloor Research, warned that extending the scope of the alliance beyond infrastructure could limit customers' options.

"In today's world, with ecommerce projects and the like, companies' IT systems need to be flexible and dynamic. This kind of deal tends to tie users into a predefined configuration that can be stifling," he said.

But Janice Chaffin, vice president and general manager of HP's Critical Computing business unit, said: "We are able to speed implementation by a few components and a unique technology called HP Somersault, integrated into SAP's R/3, which will protect customers from a single point of failure."

She added that HP was expanding its 10-year relationship with SAP in an attempt to ensure that their 6000 joint customers worldwide only suffered five minutes of downtime per year.

Middleware provider, BEA, joined the Alliance to add its Tuxedo transaction processing monitor to the mix.

Chaffin said: "We are already integrating and optimising Tuxedo for high availability in the management area. We are integrating some of the Tuxedo technology into our systems and also adding it as a smart plug-in for Openview."

She added that HP's Openview systems management software would, in future, also work with Oracle's Enterprise Manager and Cisco Works: "This will help with management because users can view from one place what's happening with their environment."

But she added that about 40 per cent of all system outages were caused by human error, which was very difficult to solve.