99.9% uptime [off topic]

[kenneth topp]

Actually, 99.9% (and most guarantees) are for unscheduled downtime...  it
works in mycrosofts case as it's scheduled for upgrades all the time.

It's a bet that microsoft knows it's worth it.  Now if mmicrosoft would
bet that they can collect greater uptimes then unix/samba doing the same
stuff, they lose.  they know that. 

feel good,

kenneth

On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Peter J. Holzer wrote:

> On 1999-10-15 22:46:22 +1000, Hall, Ken (ECSS) wrote:
> > I was reading a comment this morning about something Microsoft had
> > published to the effect that there were vendors guaranteeing 99.9%
> > uptime for NT. The guy who wrote the reply did the math for what that
> > means, and the results are very interesting.
> >
> > Quote below:
> >
> >>  OK, now what does a 99.9% uptime guarantee mean? Well, it means
> >> that at bottom, a guarantee that the machine will not be down for
> >> more than one one-thousandth of the time. If we assume that we have
> >> a stable system, ie., one where the system is not taken down for
> >> software upgrades, etc.,
> 
> I think this is a big assumption. Apart from the occasional crash in the
> evening which wasn't noticed until next morning, all our long downtimes
> in the last few years were caused by software or hardware upgrades (and
> with the large HP-UX servers, were are generally in the 99.9% range).
> Basically, I think a guarantuee of 99.9% uptime is a guarantuee that
> you won't have to upgrade/reinstall more than once per year.
> 
> You will also have to consider that users generelly aren't interested in
> a running OS but in some service. So if I have to shut down samba for
> half an hour to enlarge some file system, that's half an hour of down
> time as far as my users are concerned. 
> 
> 	hp
> 
> -- 
>    _  | Peter J. Holzer             | Nobody should ever have to be
> |_|_) | Sysadmin WSR / Obmann LUGA  | ashamed if they have a secret love
> | |   | hjp at wsr.ac.at               | for writing computer programs that
> __/   | http://wsrx.wsr.ac.at/~hjp/ | actually work.  -- Donald E. Knuth
>