Jan. 18, 2010

 

Recent examples of international terrorism and natural disasters put life in perspective: a few hours of downtime for a mobile application isn't a real tragedy. But when it does happen, planned or not, there are some basic steps an enterprise can take to mitigate the impact.

 

"It's one of the biggest issues for any kind of mobile application ... there are very few situations where that offline persistence doesn't matter," says Ken Parmelee, director of application development at Antenna Software. Unfortunately, "In terms of what most companies do about it, it varies."

 

Business customers from several years ago tended to accept downtime and outages as unmovable obstacles moreso than customers do today, Parmelee explains. Widespread use of secondary data centers, redundant storage technologies, and multiband radio modems all help to minimize the frequency, length, and severity of network downtime. So when it happens, such as during Research In Motion's outages that customers experienced twice before last month's holidays, it becomes a major event.

 

Antenna Software does its part by automatically including helpful technology in its development software. "In the toolkit situation, the challenge is that those integrated development environments actually provide some mobile intelligence inside of them for a non-carrier knowledgeable customer. It's a tremendous challenge that's very minimized outwardly today by a lot of vendors, but it's not a simple thing to do," Parmelee says. "It's a situation where we've basically dummied that down to be part of the solution. Where there's a lot more variation is on integration to the backend."

 

The most common approach is the store-and-forward technique, in which data is held until a connection is available -- that can happen in a data center or even in the mobile device because of the large amounts of memory and processing speed in modern mobile devices compared to a few years ago. But that basic approach hasn't changed much through the years.

 

A more innovative advancement is HTML 5. The standard includes persistence technology, which lets applications refresh specific data components rather than the whole page. That means users can continue interacting with some parts of a remote application even if there is network trouble. It's not a perfect solution. "That doesn't give me everything I need, but it does resolve this store-and-forward problem to a certain level," Parmelee observes. In the field, HTML 5 is supported in browsers such as Apple Safari and Google Chrome, along with Mozilla's Firefox 3.6 beta and a few parts of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Research In Motion is also getting into this technology; RIM acquired Torch Mobile last summer which makes mobile browsing software.

 

Steve Lassey, an IT director for the City of Ottawa, runs mobile applications for everything from sewer inspections to monitoring bus schedules. He works with vendors such as NetMotion and Sybase, atop Telus networks. Downtime for a Windows CE device in the sewer system isn't a big deal, but, "From the business angle it's more of an impact. We work with our vendors to keep us in the loop about all of their maintenance work on our network [and] any expected downtime they might have in our region," Lassey says. "Most of the those outages are 5 or 10 minutes, 15 tops. We have had some that have been 4 to 6 hours." Ottawa's government is also testing some mobile applications for fire and first aid squads, where any downtime falls into the true emergency category. "That to us is a much higher-priority issue to address," Lassey says.

 

Downtime can also happen because of vendors blaming each other for glitches (a problem which Antenna's Parmelee says is helped by having full-time employees whose job is to monitor and interact with service provides), and because of employees unknowingly mobilizing non-mobile applications. "People take laptops home, and then you have applications that were never designed to be mobile... We found it to be, not intolerable, not intractable, but it makes life difficult for mobile workers," Lassey says.

 

Ottawa is also currently preparing two or three RIM applications, and Lassey is plenty concerned about reliability. "There really isn't a backup for that. There's really not a lot you can do to mitigate it. You just have to hope and trust that RIM will do what they need to. I don't have warm and fuzzies yet."