100% Uptime - Myth or Reality?

The loss of critical communications such as email and business applications not only impacts on productivity but prevents the company, its customers and suppliers from communicating effectively in the supply chain. This affects the base line and ultimately profit. Shareholders are noted as becoming increasingly concerned with the level of due diligence taken on hosting providers, when companies consider moving to a cloud solution. 

 

The rise of Cloud Computing in the last 3 years has brought the questions of uptime to the forefront of discussion but there is still a heavy mist bringing confusion and uncertainty to many IT managers concerning the availability and uptime in the cloud. 

 

If you’re about to move your servers onto someone else’s platform in a data centre thousands of miles from your office, then surely the first consideration should be regarding the SLAs regarding uptime. Sure - anyone can provide 100% ‘network uptime’ but what about the localised server uptime? With Amazon and Google both reporting outages to their public clouds, what of the private cloud and can it be trusted?

 

In our recent study, we surveyed 20 leading hosting providers and discovered the shocking reality that only a few offer “three nines” (99.9%),  guaranteed uptime or above. To help make it easy for consumers to understand, we turned to Commenus PLCs Chief Systems Architect, Stuart Jennings for some clarity. Jennings took no time to draw comparison between the amount of hours you can expects from the SLAs:

 

 

 

The interesting fact is that 100% server uptime is almost an impossibility to achieve, as no one has complete control over the equipment used. The question of platform uptime and server uptime however according to Jennings, lies specifically with the geographic replication between servers and specific data centre environments. In plain terms, when your servers are copied from one location to the other. The question customers must ask is “What guarantees are in place to ensure guaranteed uptime?” and how many nines are provided in the SLA.

 

Commensus PLC offer five nines of guaranteed uptime! This ensures your servers will only experience a minimum of 6.05 seconds downtime per week! The reality however is very different as most customers continue to experience 100% uptime as ‘the norm’ in our private cloud. We think you’ll agree though - that the SLA is still quite impressive.