High availability is a hot phrase in the IT industry, but do you know what it means and how to accomplish it? IT professionals attempt to implement high availability every day by buying a lot of expensive hardware and software without tackling the real problem. Many people, both in technology jobs and in management, believe that high availability is a canned technology solution that they can put in place and forget about.

True high availability combines people and processes with technology. Although you can build highly available solutions without one of these components, attention to all three lets you provide enterprise-class availability even in the smallest environments. Without the people in place to manage the solution, along with processes designed to ensure that systems remain highly available, the technology won't be up to the task.

To detect a failure, you need technology and trained personnel. A highly trained person can prevent some failures and can detect others before they cause any problems, implementing remedies so that the system doesn't go offline at all. This preventative maintenance encompasses strong code-deployment processes that deliver baseline performance numbers for an operations team to monitor against.