Five-nines uptime over-hyped?

Despite the hype around 99.999 per cent network uptime (generally referred to as "five-nines"), at least one industry observer says the common perception that businesses will fail without five-nines uptime is misleading.

According to Dan McLean, research manager, network support and integration, at Toronto-based IDC Canada, the average business probably doesn't need five-nines uptime, and many can most likely get by on as low as 98 per cent uptime.

"Five-nines is almost portrayed as being a demand of everyday business and everyday circumstances, and five-nines is like a lot of IT concepts. It's like security; not all applications or all businesses require the same level or degree of reliability," said McLean.

As with security, five-nines is an issue of cost, he said. Achieving and maintaining five-nines reliability is a very expensive undertaking. For instance, if a company has a database of information needed for operation, the company isn't going to fail if the database goes down more than 0.001 per cent of the time. E-mail is another application that will not make or break a business, so does not require five-nines reliability, he said.

"It's an issue of doing that assessment and really understanding where it is that you need the reliability and to figure out what degree you need of reliability or availability within specific segments and specific applications of your IT environment," McLean said.

Much of the discussion surrounding five-nines reliability eventually refers to e-commerce and the perceived need for very high availability. As the cliché goes, the competition is just a click away.

"With the on-line experience, not only is there an issue if your site is unavailable, there's an issue even if your site is too slow - the issue being customer dissatisfaction," said Larry Needham, vice-president and CIO of Future Shop Ltd. of Burnaby, B.C. If the site is down, there is lost revenue and customers may not return if they have a negative first-time experience. On the other side of the equation, if Future Shop's network goes down, individual stores can continue to operate with manual calculations.

So as far as the FutureShop.ca site is concerned, Needham said five-nines reliability is necessary for business, but the company itself would not go out of business if the site was unavailable for longer periods of time. The e-commerce site makes up a very small portion of Future Shop's overall revenue.

Continuous application access with predictable performance gives companies a competitive edge, said Dave Walton, executive vice-president of enterprise services at Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc.

"For Sun, this means that delivery on this requirement will be a competitive necessity, not just an edge, so we believe that if you don't have a total focus on uptime and availability that you will not be competitive as we go forward," Walton said. "I hesitate to say any [companies] will go under [without five-nines uptime] but they certainly won't maintain the leadership role for their products and services."

For companies who have yet to make their decision on whether to put forth the money and effort needed to achieve five-nines availability on a network system or not, network managers should take into account the expense of network downtime and compare it to the cost of maintaining five-nines uptime, McLean said. If network downtime would cost less than what is necessary to maintain five-nines uptime, then the company should re-consider the extra investment it takes for five-nines.

According to Walton, however, the expense of five-nines uptime more than adequately compensates for the lost revenue that would accumulate because of server downtime.

McLean added, however, that five-nines uptime is appropriate for some, but hardly all, businesses. "The issue with, say, a stock trading floor where business just doesn't move unless the system is up and running, that may be an example of where you might want to place five-nines reliability," he said. "Even with things like e-commerce, I don't necessarily think that that's an application that requires five-nines reliability."

Looking into the future, if the assumption is that more and more companies will become dependent on their IT systems and on network connectivity, more businesses might require five-nines reliability, but at this stage, the number of businesses that require that level of uptime is fairly small, McLean said.