How many times have you heard the phrase: "The network is down" in your business?

This may mean that anything but the network is malfunctioning (it may be the server, storage or others), however, the always-guilty network-admin is usually the first one to blame.

There have been several times where people accidentally delete a network-configuration or just misconfigure something creating a catastrophic chain-reaction which eventually leads to somebody (usually the boss) constantly complaining about that issue and asking for immediate resolution.

If we talk about networking, we would need to check device by device, switch by switch, location by location (e.g. DRPs or remote locations) until we figured it out, while the annoying phone would keep ringing since the business is down or somehow affected. According to Gartner, the average cost of a single minute of IT downtime is$5,600, which means more than$330,000 gone in an hour!

In today's Multicloud World, this gets even worse. Having not only multiple Data Centers to manage but also multiple form factors like Physical, Virtual, Container-Based and even Public Cloud environments, a potential outage may quickly become a nightmare to troubleshoot.

Before, we would only rely on the hardware redundancy and confidence a specific brand would provide, but today, Software-Defined Infrastructure technologies add-up to that and may also play a major role for your company. By using features in your network like ACI Rollbacks (which apply a working configuration from a previous snapshot where everything was working fine) you may now recover a complex network with several locations, form-factors and devices injust 3 secondsas shown in the video below!

 As we said before, it is not only the network to blame, so leveraging technologies that could do what ACI does for Compute and Storage is now possible with solutions like HyperFlex and Veeam. Instead of restoring full LUNs or Datastores from traditional backup solutions to the main storage to recover from a corrupt database for example (which can take hours or days), we can now leverage Instant Recovery Capabilities based on the HyperFlex Snapshots which are constantly taken. This allows Veeam to publish the VM, File or even Application Object (such as e-mails, OUs from Active Directory and others) directly from the Backup Repository.

There will always be risk in everything we do including IT downtime. It is not enough nowadays to prevent risk with redundant environments only, we must react and recover ASAP since business won't wait.

If you ask me, I'll take any time solutions that get me back in business in 3 seconds than endless troubleshooting and not-so-friendly phone calls to make me fix the problem. This was not possible before (and would make IT admins lives harder especially at night), so, why don't we leverage technology as a business advantage instead? Just saying...

To learn more, watch The Power of the Cisco Data Center Architecture Series: High-Availability, a video in a 6-part series, which covers how High-Availability is maintained and achieved like never before at the networking, compute and storage level. Instead of risking our businesses to be offline after failure, we will learn how to quickly recover using ACI, HyperFlex and UCS.