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Charles Schwab & Co. learned the hard way how the Internet can push storage technology to the breaking point. Schwab's online trading site shut down the morning of February 24 due to a failure in reconfiguring DASD storage for DB2 log records. The outage, one of several suffered by Schwab recently, resulted in dissatisfied customers and embarrassing headlines.
"That's one of the things that can happen when you make changes to an environment,'' says a philosophical Fred Matteson, executive VP of IT. "What can happen when you make changes is that {the new apps may} not work like you intended.''
Ironically, Schwab was actually trying to reconfigure storage software to enhance reliability. The company was setting up a dedicated space for DB2 transaction logs to avoid having the logs fill up other areas of storage. Unfortunately, a software glitch occurred.
"The DB2 log filled up and couldn't exit gracefully,'' explains Matteson. "Other copies of the database and other applications that needed access to the data also failed. The failures went on, pathologically. All the apps ground to a halt as one by one they needed data that was unavailable.''
What has Schwab learned from the experience? "Nothing,'' says Matteson, because there's nothing to learn. The failure was due to a software bug and bugs are inevitable in any system.
Matteson boasts of Schwab's impressive uptime record this past year. "We've had eight outages totaling 6.1 hours,'' he says. "That's one-tenth of one percent of all the trading hours. Across 252 trading days, we've had 99.89 percent availability. Those aren't bad {numbers}.''
The high praise Matteson sings over Schwab's comparative lack of outages illustrates the new demands for reliability in the world of e-business. Previously, an enhanced reliability level was required only for a small subset of a company's systems. Now, it's mandated across the enterprise as e-business apps require greater degrees of reliability, scalability, and availability than ever before. In response IT managers are evolving new strategies and turning to advanced technologies to meet these needs.
"Even a year or two ago, a lot of companies didn't look at those types of applications as mission-critical or requiring the highest order of support or protection,'' explains Peter Gibbs, director of marketing for the Clariion unit...