“Uptime, what’s in 0.1%?” What a great question!

Putting some meat on the bones, this article delves into some of the well-know social media sites and produces some interesting statistics, not just about the sites, but about their availability figures. It concludes by stating that 99.99% availablility is ok and is a good balance between availability and affordability.

But for tier 1 applications, 99.99% just simply isn’t good enough. These types of systems demand ultimate availability. Sometimes this is for customer satisfaction reasons, sometimes data integrity or maybe because it is really hard work recovering systems after outages. For whatever reason, there is choice and the ability these days to run commercially available operating systems on fault tolerant hardware. Applications do not have to be re-engineered and it truly is an out-of-the-box availability solution.

And the good news is, the solution costs little more than you would have paid otherwise.