Require Downtime72%

28% Can Stay Up

What roles are involved in a maintenance window on your critical apps?

Database failover takes down applications. In the best of cases, database failover interrupts applications, and few enterprises have architected for best case. Failover is usually manual and causes apps to hang.

How frequently do you have maintenance windows on your most critical apps?

What events have you deferred or delayed because of concerns about downtime for your critical applications?

The State of Application Uptime in Database Environments

For unplanned outages on your critical apps...

users see app errors:

secondary promotion is:

following an outage, apps:

...for the duration of the failover 59%

...rarely 41%

...manual 60%

...automatic 40%

...must be restarted 62%

...can recover on their own 38%

Database outages are too frequent and too long. The database is causing application downtime at least once a month for more than 20% of enterprises. Outages are lasting 20 minutes to three hours for more than 65% of enterprises.

How frequently is the database the cause of unplanned downtime?

Multiple Times a Week – 0.5%

Once a Week – 3.5%

A Couple of Times a Month – 7.5%

Once a Month – 9.2%

Less Frequently than Once a Month – 79.3%

On average, how long do unplanned outages last on your most critical apps?

Less than a Minute – 5.7%

A Few Minutes – 23.7%

20-60 Minutes – 42.5%

1-3 Hours – 23.3%

3-24 Hours – 4.4%

more than a day – 0.4%

Database maintenance crushes resources. Performing maintenance on the database takes apps down, with almost 35% of enterprises needing to call maintenance windows one or more times a week. And valuable developer time is wasted too often.

When performing database maintenance do apps require downtime or can they stay up?

Applying Security Patches60%

Less than Once a Month – 21%

Once a Week – 26%

Once a Month – 32% Once Every Couple of Weeks – 12%

Multiple Times a Week – 8%

Deferred security is common, placing enterprises at risk. More than 60% of enterprises report delaying security patches because of concerns over downtime.

Updating the App70%

Upgrading the Database73%

Operations DBAs Developers

83% 81% 52%

For more survey results, go to www.scalearc.com/SurveyResults

“This survey makes clear that enterprises cannot afford to maintain the status quo when it comes to database availability. Having your most critical applications be offline for 20 minutes to three hours, more than once a month, should not be acceptable to any enterprise today.”

– Matt Aslett, Research Director, 451 Research

Findings from a 2015 enterprise IT survey