Re: TOLERANCE DATA 2009.1 GREEK
Harriet Wehrenberg
An operating system that offers a solid definition for faults cannot be disrupted by a single point of failure. It ensures business continuity and the high availability of crucial applications and systems regardless of any failures.
Fault tolerance can be built into a system to remove the risk of it having a single point of failure. To do so, the system must have no single component that, if it were to stop working effectively, would result in the entire system failing.
This describes a situation when a fault-tolerant system encounters a fault but continues to function as usual. This means the system sees no change in performance metrics like throughput or response time.
Some diverse fault-tolerance options result in the backup not having the same level of capacity as the primary source. This may, in some cases, require the system to ensure graceful degradation until the primary power source is restored.
Fault-tolerant systems use redundancy to remove the single point of failure. The system is equipped with one or more power supply units (PSUs), which do not need to power the system when the primary PSU functions as normal. In the event the primary PSU fails or suffers a fault, it can be removed from service and replaced by a redundant PSU, which takes over system function and performance.
Replication is a more complex approach to achieving fault tolerance. It involves using multiple identical versions of systems and subsystems and ensuring their functions always provide identical results. If the results are not identical, then a democratic procedure is used to identify the faulty system. Alternatively, a procedure can be used to check for a system that shows a different result, which indicates it is faulty.
Replication can either take place at the component level, which involves multiple processors running simultaneously, or at the system level, which involves identical computer systems running simultaneously.
Hardware systems can be backed up by systems that are identical or equivalent to them. A typical example is a server made fault-tolerant by deploying an identical server that runs in parallel to it and mirrors all its operations, such as the redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID), which combines physical disk components to achieve redundancy and improved performance.
Software systems can be made fault-tolerant by backing them up with other software. A common example is backing up a database that contains customer data to ensure it can continuously replicate onto another machine. As a result, in the event that a primary database fails, normal operations will continue because they are automatically replicated and redirected onto the backup database.
Power sources can also be made fault-tolerant by using alternative sources to support them. One approach is to run devices on an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Another is to use backup power generators that ensure storage and hardware, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) continue to operate as normal if the primary power source fails.
Fault-tolerant systems require organizations to have multiple versions of system components to ensure redundancy, extra equipment like backup generators, and additional hardware. These components need regular maintenance and testing. They also take up valuable space in data centers.
One way around the cost of fault tolerance is to opt for more cost-effective but lower-quality redundant components. This approach can inadvertently increase maintenance and support costs and make the system less reliable. To avoid such a situation, organizations must monitor the performance of individual components and keep an eye on their lifespan in relation to their cost.
Fault tolerance inevitably makes it more difficult to know if components are performing to the expected level because failures do not automatically result in the system going down. As a result, organizations will require additional resources and expenditure to continuously test and monitor their system health for faults.
The growth and resilience of your organization begins with a quantitative understanding of your risk tolerance. Embed this view into your enterprise risk management framework and you can lay the foundation for advanced analytical insights.
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By transforming risk tolerance conversations from qualitative to quantitative, you can align risk management to the financial performance goals of the business and deliver crucial insight for long-term resilience.
A lack of risk tolerance transparency could be due to limited access to reliable data, or business areas prioritizing different metrics, such as free cashflow, debt covenants, or earnings per share. This can leave understandings of risk tolerance misaligned across the organization, hard-to-track across reporting periods, and opaque to stakeholders.
You can incorporate Risk Tolerance Clarified into your enterprise risk management and operational risk considerations within a best practice risk governance framework. Alternatively, you can use the tool as part of your quarterly financial reporting and to evaluate planned significant investments or changes to your corporate structure.
Gallup polling in Lebanon reveals that many assumptions about the country are oversimplified or untrue. The first is that Lebanon is an increasingly intolerant country, one where Christians feel unsafe. The second is that Christians feel so unsafe that they wish to emigrate. The third is that if emigration is a noted phenomenon, it is a phenomenon that is evident with Christians more than other groups within the country.
Commentators in both the Arab and the Western press have expressed fears that Christian Arabs are fleeing the Arab world in increasing numbers in recent years as a result of increased political Islamist activity and a perceived rise in intolerance in the region. In June of last year, Pope Benedict XVI warned that if no solutions to regional conflicts were found, the Christian community of the region would soon disappear. The Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon, Nasrallah Sfeir, has echoed similar concerns about the emigration of Christians in the region. After a meeting with French President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2010, Sfeir quoted him as saying that the Christian presence in the region was "a guarantee against the rise of extremism." This statement underlies the concern that Christians are emigrating and assumes that extremism, as well as intolerance, is a grave issue in Lebanon.
Gallup's data show that Lebanon's people are very likely to be tolerant. In reaction to the statement: "I would not object to a person of a different religious faith moving next door," most (76%) say they "strongly agree." To place this into a wider context, this is significantly higher than many countries in Europe and in the nearby region, including Belgium (65%), the U.K. (57%), Germany (57%), Italy (53%), and Israel (23%). In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Lebanon is also the country most likely to strongly agree with this statement, a key way to ascertain levels of tolerance in a country. Gallup has been polling the Lebanese population for several years in the context of its regional and global research to measure the levels of tolerance in various countries.
It should also be noted that while this attitude of coexistence is high, so is the propensity to consider religion important. Eighty-two percent of Muslim Lebanese consider religion to be important - 86% of Christian Lebanese do as well. Fifty percent of Muslims say they attended religious service in the last seven days, as do 65% of Christians, according to Gallup's most recent data.
According to Gallup data, 28% of Christians (including Maronites, Greek Orthodox, and others) would like to move to another country if they were able to. That is not a particularly low number, but it can hardly be described as flight - considering the Gallup question was trying to ascertain whether people would leave as opposed to if they were actually leaving.
Moreover, if we were to describe this as flight (presumably feeling under threat, according to the common media narrative), then we would have to characterize the same when it comes from the Muslim community of Lebanon. Approximately 34% of Muslim Lebanese (34% of Sunnis and 35% of Shiites) would leave if they had the ability to do so - which is more (albeit not much more) than Christian Lebanese (28%). Religion factors into the discussion not when comparing Muslims with Christians, but when discussing religious and non-religious Lebanese. Those who see religion as important are less likely to want to leave than those who do not see religion as important - this is true across all religious groups.
The data reveal some other interesting aspects of those who are more likely to want to emigrate from Lebanon. According to the data, of the Lebanese who said they wanted to leave but decided to stay, 35% did so to get a better job and 27% did so due to general improvements in the economy. People who said they wanted to leave but decided to stay cite these two reasons most often. Additionally, those who said they are living comfortably are less likely to want to leave than those who are finding it difficult. Thus, economic reasons appear to be at the forefront of people's reasons for wanting to leave - as well as their decisions to stay.
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