Mission Critical applications within businesses need high availability technologies to protect them. Available technologies include RAID, power redundancy, multi-pathing, physical contingency planning, clustering, and multi-site deployment. Some or all of these may be applicable but there is a need to perform an analysis of the environment and the application to determine the justification.

First, it is necessary to review the technologies already implemented for the particular environment to see if they can be enhanced. Sometimes there are simple improvements that will provide great benefit with a minimum of investment. Other times there are situations where the running application environment must be inspected to determine the changes that are needed prior to moving to a high availability solution.