Availability of ICT systems has been highlighted as one of the most critical factors instrumental to an organization success in today’s business world. As a backbone to many services provided by organizations ICT infrastructures have potential to impact a company’s ability to attract or lose customers. Academic institutions having reinvented themselves as businesses to attract students are not exempt to this rule. Faced with constrained budgets many universities in developing countries find it difficult to implement conventional high availability solutions such as multiple high-end servers. It is thus crucial that relatively economical but effective alternatives be explored. Hence this paper proposes the adoption of a High Availability (HA) cluster model for the University of Botswana ICT infrastructure to alleviate downtime and service unavailability. To illustrate this need we model the current system availability using a measurement based service availability model. The model is parameterized using service downtime experienced during an eleven month period in 2018. From the model an Availability score of 99.234% is obtained for the university. The score while relatively high is below the 99.999% optimal level range required in highly available systems. Hence, this paper recommends a high availability cluster model based on the architecture proposed in this study.

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