Maintenance Technology September 2016 - 69

8 "Today's problems with reliability are more fundamental, a reflection of the complexity of contemporary networks, the volume of data, the pace of change, insufficient organizational and cultural practices, and a legacy of arcane and poorly written business software that traditionally put little emphasis on usability..." media, communication networks and public transportation all have become indispensable to everyday modern life. The RCM methodology, developed for complex systems, particularly mechanical, is applicable to the complex systems/ processes comprising IT networks for mitigating the consequences of failure. Furthermore, many regulatory boards and standards institutes have developed requirements and guidelines for data integrity. The following is a list of regulatory and compliance standards which set minimum requirements for sustaining business operations, disaster recovery, business continuity management (BCM) and information and communication technology (ICT) continuity: The list to the right demonstrates there is little lack of importance for sustained data integrity, business continuity planning, disaster recovery and ICT continuity, all of which require a reliablydesigned and maintained IT system and support infrastructure. Consider a centralized network where a simple loss of connection between the server and client is enough to cause a failure, but in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks the connections between every node must be lost in order to cause a data sharing failure. In a centralized system, the administrators are responsible for all data recovery and backups, while in P2P systems each node requires its own backup system. Each network has its advantages and disadvantages, along with failure mode and failure consequences. Leveraging the operating context required in an RCM analysis allows a team of IT operators, maintainers and external subject matter experts to rigorously analyze a network. This helps us list functions, functional failures, causes of failure and failure effects. Finally, we utilize a decision matrix as a focusing tool to review the failure consequences and determine the proposed task(s) which are intended to reduce or eliminate those consequences of failure. Consider, again, a disk array where the applications utilizing this hardware (along with statistical data on disk failure rate) could be analyzed to determine both the opportunities for failure (and possible mitigations) as well as the cost of the associated business applications should there be a failure. While most disk arrays leverage some degree of redundancy, the rigorous RCM analysis for reviewing the operating context, function, functional failures, failure modes and failure effect results in identification of default task(s) or if a new proposed maintenance task for the array is technically feasible and worth doing. SOLUTIONS AUGUST 2016 10127-4056 SMRP Solutions SE.indd 8 8/22/16 9:43 AM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology September 2016