How Low-Cost Telecom Killed Five 9s in Cloud Computing
March 14, 2013
Grazed from Wired. Author: Rick Stevenson.
A major enabler of cloud computing over the past five years has been the rise of ubiquitous, commodity broadband and the drop in price for consumer wired and wireless telecommunications. Today, we can cheaply connect people and devices anywhere to almost anything else – a trend that’s created an explosion of cloud-based products and services. Although bargain data plans have enabled mesh-like connectivity, this growing complexity has also killed an idea that we, as an industry, were obsessed with in the late 1990s; namely, five 9s reliability.
This isn’t necessarily bad, but it does require a rethink. The game isn’t about uptime any more. It’s about how quickly you can fix complex systems when the inevitable happens. And just to make it more interesting, those systems are no longer neatly contained in your data center…
Achieving five 9s reliability has been an important concept in telecommunications and computing for a long time. Literally, “five 9s” is defined as your computing infrastructure working 99.999% of the time (which means the maximum downtime in a year is no more than 5 minutes and 15.36 seconds annually, or slightly longer in a leap year)…
Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/03/how-low-cost-telecom-killed-five-9s-in-cloud-computing/