Advanced High Availability architecture

One of the most important contributing factors to the success of ServiceNow and reasons why enterprises trust it, is their Advanced High Availability (AHA) architecture. It is one of the key elements of ServiceNow; being able to offer a true enterprise cloud. Their multi-instance architecture along with Advanced High Availability is designed exclusively by ServiceNow to meet and exceed their enterprise customer's stringent requirements surrounding data security, availability, and performance.

ServiceNow's datacenters are designed to be available 24/7, 365 days a year and all data center components like servers and network devices are redundant and have multiple network paths to avoid a single point of failure. They back customer's production instances with multiple connections to the internet and load balance them within each data center. Furthermore, database servers in one data center are asynchronously replicated in real time to a peer data center within the same geographic region:

As of writing this book, ServiceNow operates a total of 16 data centers (eight pairs) in the following geographic locations:

• Asia Pacific Japan (APJ)
• Australia
• Europe
• Swiss (country-specific)
• Middle East and Africa (EMEA)
• North America:
  • America
  • Canada
• South America

Furthermore, to ensure data is never lost, ServiceNow conducts regular backups. The backup cycle consists of four weekly full backups and the past 6 days of daily, differential backups that provide 28 days of backups. ServiceNow doesn't rely on tapes and stores backup data to disk. Also, no backups are sent off site.