Who's Your Data?

5-nines of availability is what the consulting industry would call the Deputy management’s request. That translates into about 30 seconds a year in downtime. That’s how long it took me to write the last two sentences (poor keyboard skills). Given the technical infrastructure the Deputy had to deal with, the two of us could hardly calculate the cost to implement 5-nines. I am looking over my notes from the call, there appear to be at least 10 zero’s in the last column.

How about 3-nines of availability? That is about 9 hours of downtime a year. I asked the Deputy if that was realistic. He told me that on average they are down about five hours a month and one time they had been down for 16 hours straight. We talked about a number of strategies to improve availability. I saw a few holes in their clustering setup. There was room for additional redundancy (is that redundant?). And some of the Sys Admins were in need of training.

We calculated the cost for the entire organization to upgrade email to 3-nines of availability. The estimate was $20 million. We both had a good laugh at that one. Finally, we settled on 2-nines of availability. That would give the IT staff about 3 ½ days of downtime to play around with a year. It wasn’t meeting the need for 24x7 availability, but the higher ups weren’t getting that anyway. The price tag was an immodest $7 million. This was steep, but within budget. The Deputy felt that they could do much better than 2-nines with these upgrades, but he liked the idea of setting realistic expectations.

He prepared a PowerPoint to logically lay out the case for 2-nines of availability. He knew the bosses would be disappointed that they were not going to deliver 5-nines. The Deputy felt his case was strong and logic unassailable. I caught up with him last week. I asked the Deputy how the presentation had gone. Did they get the piercing logic of his reasoning? Were they humbled by his slide showing a long term pattern of decreased IT investment as inboxes grew exponentially?

“You know what they said when I was done?”, the Deputy CIO asked. “They told me to shut up”.