Increasing Redundancy Is Leading To Zero Downtime

from the department-of-redundancy dept

Mon, Nov 30th 2009 3:02pm — ITInnovation

It's nearing the end of the year, so not surprisingly, there's more talk about what's in store for the next year and the near future. Out of these discussions, one of the interesting points predicts that zero downtime is moving to replace "five-nines" of availability. It's not exactly a new concept to plan backups for when components will fail (not if they will), but redundant hardware components are becoming increasingly common as the costs for them decrease. Spare processors can be activated at will. Entire facilities can be replicated in disparate geographic locations. There may always be unexpected downtime, but the costs associated with them are trending towards being more manageable.

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Devin Moore (profile), 7 Dec 2009 @ 2:44pm

Zero downtime is inevitable
Consider the size of the Internet, and the amount of unused server capacity in existence today. Assuming that each server farm had a backup of the next one over, and assuming each could replicate the other site's DNS, etc. couldn't the Internet survive intact on a failure of any size at any single datacenter? I think zero downtime will be a unifying concern of enough ISP's, datacenter and farm providers for them to all team up and give each other that backup support at some point in the future.
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