Working for a disaster recovery solutions designer is often difficult. After being bombarded by ad slogans, magazine articles and just plain life experience, many company executives are looking to achieve a mythical figure for server uptime. Perceived uptime of 99.999 percent — or “five nines” — equates to about five minutes and 30 seconds of unexpected downtime per year, and the number is achievable. The problem is, this number is only achievable if the language is carefully scrutinized and an overwhelming amount of hardware and software is brought to the table.
Don't forget about the power and cooling infrastructure needed to deliver that server reliability. If an application needs to deliver "five nines," then the infrastructure that resides within the application must be able to deliver at least "five nines." Having a server go offline, if the application is properly virtualized, can have minimal effect on user uptime. However, unexpected downtime of the UPS can take down an entire data center. Therefore, it is very important to determine the overall availability of the SYSTEM to determine where redundancy is truly needed.
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Learning to Love Reasonable Downtime
Posted by: Mike Talon May 24, 2010 06:00 AMWorking for a disaster recovery solutions designer is often difficult. After being bombarded by ad slogans, magazine articles and just plain life experience, many company executives are looking to achieve a mythical figure for server uptime. Perceived uptime of 99.999 percent — or “five nines” — equates to about five minutes and 30 seconds of unexpected downtime per year, and the number is achievable. The problem is, this number is only achievable if the language is carefully scrutinized and an overwhelming amount of hardware and software is brought to the table.