Cubic Compass Software
The Battle With "3 Nines" and The Goal of "5 Nines"

We had a couple outages in our i-Dialogue hosting service today that resulted in about 7-10 minutes of total downtime for the week.

Our enterprise hosting provider guarantees 99.9% uptime, which as you can see from the table below, is 8.76 hours of downtime per year, or about 10 minutes per week.

Guarantee % Allowable downtime per year
99% 87.6 hours (Ouch... thats 3.65 days!)
99.9% 8.76 hours (much better)
99.99% 52.5 minutes (not bad)
99.999% 5.2 minutes (The "5 nines" holy grail)
99.9999% < 1 minute

While it's tempting to make a lot of noise with our service provider about 7 minutes of downtime, it's actually still within the 10 minute per week SLA. I just wish it were 10 minutes of planned downtime at 3am in the morning :-)

We've definitely learned that 99.9% uptime on massively scaled, shared infrastructure is a constant battle. Us "software guys" do not envy the "hardware and network guys" at all.

So, we spent some time today researching how we could offer 4 and 5 nine uptime options to our customers who need near 100% reliability.

Isolation and redundancy are the keys to achieving 5 nines, which effectively means doubling the costs of the underlying infrastructure. The actual costs are not as exponential as I originally thought. The path from 3 nines to 5 nines is nearly linear based on our early research.

Keep an eye on our pricing page for more details in the future.

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Posted: Saturday, January 06, 2007 6:38:36 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #   
Comments [2]  | 
Tuesday, January 09, 2007 4:44:06 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Funny, I used to think a 99% uptime was fine until you actually experience that 1% downtime :)

Not even 10 minutes hurts!

99.9 would be great!

One thing that really bothers me though is that the since salesforce is based on the west coast their scheduled maintenance downtimes take place during the day on the east coast.

This is something to consider when signing up to salesforce.

Also, I guess it must be tough for you Cubic Compass to service on the east coast with the time differential :))..... at the moment Mike always seems available but for how long can you go without sleep? :)
Jason | jasonAT NOSPAMcatamarans dot com
Tuesday, January 09, 2007 4:58:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Oh, I definitely like to sleep at night :-)

The auto-responder to this page provides customers with off-hour support options. There's always someone on call.

http://www.i-dialogue.com/support-request.aspx
Mike Leach | mikeAT NOSPAMcubiccompass dot com
Comments are closed.