Online Trading Technology | Fail-Safe Currency Trading

Forex Workstation High Availability

Have you ever given high availabilty for your Forex workstation any serious thought? Consider the following situation: you have a number of contracts open and everything seems to go rather nice. Then, guess what, the weather turns and a thunderstorm is visiting your area. All of a sudden you're staring into dark computer displays. Now what? Do you know what to do next? Do you know, what you should have done, before disaster knocked on your door?

High availability, say what?

There is much confusion about high availability. For some it means that after a failure the repair time is cut in half, for others it means that computer systems become virtually uninterruptable.

Then there is this measure of availability: ads sometimes present values of 99.9%, 99.95% or even 99.99% availability.
Time for a reality check: the cynical, cold, clinical way of looking at these figures is to realize that high availibility systems apparently have downtime too, however small the chance is.
Another way to look at it is to determine what a, say, 99.9% availability means in the context of a trading day. Does this mean that there's a 0.1% chance of systems failing on me? And if they do, will this 0.1% occurrence result in a significant downtime?

No more workstation downtime you say?

Now, that would be nice, wouldn't it? It really depends on your perspective. Hardware will fail, it always has and most probably will continue to do so - ad infinitum.
High Availibility allows you to continue with your mission, in spite of failing hardware. To achieve this, you need redundant hardware, redundant software and a method to activate those redundant components when the need arises.

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