Is Downtime More Frequent, or More Visible?

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Is Downtime More Frequent, or More Visible?

Is Downtime More Frequent, or More Visible?
- By: Rich Miller
  July 6th, 2008
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Are leading Internet sites reliable enough? The New York Times examines web downtime today in a front-page story, which focuses on users’ growing reliance upon web services. “Now the Web is an irreplaceable part of daily life, and Internet companies have plans to make us even more dependent on it,” writes Brad Stone. “The problem is that this ideal requires Web services to be available around the clock

Omar Sultan

Posted July 6th, 2008

I guess I would wonder if downtime is more frequent. Of course, I cut my teeth on DEC VAXes and the like, so perhaps I have a different frame of reference.

I think individual products are getting better at protecting against downtime, but I think the systems themselves are getting come complex, so it may be a wash. Even virtualization has a double edged sword. In talking with customers, it can certainly help maintain system availability, but at the same time, it can complicate troubleshooting and problem resolution.

One thing that I would agree with is that IT has gotten more deeply integrated into core business processes and customers/employees/management assume system availability, so any and all failures have much higher visibility.

Omar Sultan
Cisco