[Bush2000]

You have no knowledge of our business, so how can you possibly know our availability requirements?

You revealed yourself when you questioned the cost of availability. If you actually required 5x9's of availability, you'd know that cost is secondary to the fundamental uptime requirement of running a mission critical enterprise (ie. power plant, 911 service, etc).

[ShadowAce]

If you actually required 5x9's of availability, you'd know that cost is secondary to the fundamental uptime requirement of running a mission critical enterprise (ie. power plant, 911 service, etc).

So what you're saying is that if you required 5 nines, you'd jump all over the first vendor to come along, rather than shop around with those requirements?

Give me a break.

[HAL9000]

You revealed yourself when you questioned the cost of availability. If you actually required 5x9's of availability, you'd know that cost is secondary to the fundamental uptime requirement of running a mission critical enterprise (ie. power plant, 911 service, etc).

I've seen it all and done it all, Bushie - and from experience, I can tell you that you can devise the perfect plan and spend millions of dollars in disaster mitigations plans - and something will still go wrong. In the real world, we have things called "budgets" and "cost-effectiveness" that limit our ability to totally eliminate downtime.

I remember the fault-tolerant systems that failed. I remember the diesel generators that didn't kick in when they were supposed to. I remember the guy who hit the big red switch above the door when he was walking out with a ladder. I remember the backhoe operators who dug up the SONET cable. I remember the underground fire that outlasted the giant batteries. We survived those disasters and many others.