HA Metrics on Non-clustered Systems?

javester asks: "Has anybody given any thought to compiling metrics for high-availability for the different OSs on a high-availability non-clustered system? Is 'High-availability Windows' an oxymoron? Can you even get close the 5 9s (99.999% which is about 5 minutes of downtime a year) on a typical stand-alone Windows 2000 Server running IIS 5 with typical patch-it-up, three-finger salute routine? If you are just serving up a web-site on a plain-vanilla Windows box, how highly-available can it get? By my calculations, with the typical reboot cycle being 3 minutes, and with a security patch requiring a reboot being released on a weekly basis - a stand-alone high-availability Windows box looses about 156 minutes a year just applying patches! So it can never get past the third 9! In *nix environments, reboots are not required as often (except for kernel changes - how APT!), since you can recycle the appropriate daemon without restarting. But really, has anybody made a formal study?" Now wouldn't this make an interesting college project?

Comments

promised uptime on windows...

[bcarlson]

I met with [insert name of huge telecom company here] this week. My boss and I discussed uptime with the regional salesperson. He discussed "five 9" uptime on windows like it was nothing. Now, jump forward to yesterday afternoon when their engineers called me asking about our proposed configuration... I told him, and asked him what the approximate guaranteed uptime would be... he said about "89-92%". heh... gotta love engineers being honest.

sorry... just thought it was funny...