High-Availability Services

Information is one of your organization’s main assets. Each business process is increasingly dependent on the availability of information systems. Lack of availability of any critical IT resource can cripple the business process, affecting not only revenue and productivity, but also relationships with your customers and business partners, and your organization’s reputation.

The greater the cost of IT downtime, the more important it is to ensure higher levels of IT availability. In order to guarantee such a very high availability level to its customers, Bull has developed a range of specialist High-Availability (HA) Services, delivered by dedicated technical teams using specific tools. Bull’s approach involves assessing the potential availability of IT environments, giving advice on possible architecture upgrades along with on-going technical follow-up. This ensures a high availability ratio for optimized return on investment in customers’ information systems.

Bull’s HA Services provide the answers to your most demanding requirements: guaranteeing high availability for all your critical hardware and systems.

HA Services
The HA999 contract is the most comprehensive service in Bull’s GlobalCare catalogue. The HA999 contract guarantees 99.90%. availability: representing a cumulative system down-time of 8 hours and 42 minutes a year in a 24x7 production cycle (8,760 hours/year). In order to respect this commitment, the service call flow has been redesigned. There is no risk of your information getting lost or misunderstood, because HA999 calls are taken directly by our specialist system engineers in a HA Center running 24x7. Where your requirements are for higher than 99.90 % availability, Bull can offer customized contracts. The HA Center also regularly provides support when it comes to questions of platform security and optimized operation. If disaster strikes, our dedicated ARF Linux support team helps customers to transfer and restart their activities on the appropriate recovery system (development server). A quarterly report allows customers to check and analyze all the system events that have occurred.

HA extensions
To further enhance the levels of availability for your systems, you can choose from three other service options:
1. Technical Account Manager (TAM)
2. 24x7 on-site coverage
3. Application alarms.

Permanent remote monitoring
With your agreement, Bull ensures the permanent remote monitoring of your operating systems. In the event of a complex problem related to non-Bull products such as Linux, Windows or AIX, our various technical partnerships means we have established a rapid escalation and resolution process: such support requests are immediately passed up the line experts in our partner organizations, via a secured remote connection.

Customer benefits

• Commitment to high availability (guaranteed to be at least 99.90%)
• Direct links and relationships with Bull engineers at our HA Center who are familiar with the details of the actual customer context
• Immediate and automated alarms, thanks to the permanent remote monitoring
• Regular knowledge transfer to the customer’s technical team in charge of the systems, delivering better security and better infrastructure performance
• High visibility of systems operations, thanks to the quarterly ’High-Availability Report’.

HA Services operations

• Remote monitoring
• Direct access to experts
• System support
• Systems metrology
• Security support
• Change management support
• 24 hours x 365 days of coverage
• Quarterly HA report.