Are Uptime Requirements Keeping You Down?

This is the third post in a series on The Perfect Storm for IT Operations. Check out the earlier post on complexity of systems and change acceleration.

About ten or twelve years ago, a company could afford some downtime for an application such as email. Today, it is hard to find a company that is not striving for the “five nines” of availability across all of their business applications. In fact, business are now demanding “always on” support (or 100% uptime) – a shift in attitudes toward downtime that is giving IT Operations teams everywhere major “agita.” (Apologies to Tony Soprano for using his word).

Downtime comes in two flavors: planned and unplanned. Unplanned downtime is the boogeyman for IT Operations – causing beepers to go off and instigating a mad scramble to get everything back to normal. Planned downtime includes service windows and other periods devoted to maintenance. Although planned downtime used to be tolerated by companies, more and more we hear from companies who tell us their unplanned downtime hours (or minutes) are shrinking due to business needs and customer demand.

Some downtime is accounted for in SLAs – occasionally there may be a planned outage of one night or a weekend to install changes, patches and updates. But for the most part, companies require their software infrastructure to be up and running all the time to better service their clients and consumers. In this world of 24-7 service and instant gratification, many companies (especially those selling a product online) can’t afford “three nines” or even “four nines” of availability – they need “five nines”.

Here is a chart that explains the nines and calculates them into hours.

Also, here is some interesting background on the “myth of the nines” (sounds like a Tolkein novel) and why uptime requirements are difficult to achieve for companies with highly integrated and complex systems.

The pressure for uptime isn’t going to subside soon, and it shouldn’t. IT Operations teams will need to embrace more effective methods to account for change and complexity in order to meet uptime demand.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Filed Under: Change Management, Downtime