Understanding the Business Impact of High-Availability and Disaster Recovery

The availability required of a Lync Server system can have a major financial impact. It is important to work with the business owners to understand the appropriate balance of availability and cost. As the availability of a system is increased, cost rises in the areas covered in the following subsections.

Server Hardware and Software

The most obvious area where an organization will see increased costs is in server costs. When a Lync service is being scaled to match high service levels, additional servers as well as software for those servers are required. In a typical case, each server can come with additional costs, such as these:

• Physical hardware

• Hardware warranty/service

• Datacenter space (if physical)

• Windows Operating System license

• SQL Server license (if backend or witness for failover)

• Lync Server license

• Antivirus license

• System management software license (such as SCCM or other management software)

As can be seen in the preceding list, adding more systems to the environment can introduce lots of new costs. In many organizations, the cost to deploy additional servers is worth the investment for providing service availability. However, it is important to consider these costs when designing for availability.

Networking

Major network investments must be made to support any highly available Unified Communications (UC) service. In addition to often having to increase bandwidth, and deploy additional circuits for redundancy, the network configuration will become much more complex. Consider the following areas when planning for network costs related to availability:

• Network bandwidth

• Additional network circuits

• Network hardware (routers, switches, firewalls, hardware load balancers, and so on)

• Licensing for advanced features (many systems require additional licensing to support high-availability scenarios)

The network often requires a major investment when deploying UC. A major portion of the network investment might be related to capacity and quality increases to support usage, but a large portion should also be considered for supporting the availability of the entire UC service.

System Operations Complexity

To support the additional servers and network equipment and configurations that are deployed, highly skilled engineers are required to follow very well-defined procedures. Keep in mind that in order to ensure that the service availability for Lync Server, end-to-end management of the infrastructure must be streamlined. This includes everything from server management, client deployment, and support, to network management and facilities management.

The processes deployed to support a highly available service increase the complexity of the environment, and as a result the service is more expensive to run. This cost is associated with the staff to manage the environment. Consider the time that must be spent supporting the complex systems, as well as following procedures to ensure proper availability. This will result in additional head count, as well as more advanced resources. In some instances, this will also result in third-party support contracts. Although a third-party support service might be required to ensure service availability, it often is not accounted for in initial financial planning.

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