In this chapter, we have introduced the concept of High Availability and tried to pinpoint why it is so important to organizations. The cost of an unplanned outage can run to millions of dollars. Consequently, organizations are employing sophisticated hardware and software tools to eliminate as many Single Points Of Failure in their IT infrastructure as possible. In subsequent chapters, we look in detail at some of these tools, including the setup, management, and maintenance of a Serviceguard High Availability cluster.
