Is 50% uptime sufficient?

Service levels, or how much uptime a system provides, have been one of the key considerations in designing and managing a messaging system over the past few years. We have found that the target for most companies is 99.8% or better with a desire for constant improvement in that level of service.

Interestingly, however, high service levels may not be that necessary for some decentralized organizations whose operations are distributed worldwide. For example, I received an e-mail from a reader of this column who manages the network operating systems for a large, multinational Lotus Notes/Domino-enabled manufacturer of consumer products whose name everyone would recognize. Here's an excerpt from that e-mail:

" Since our manufacturing is done on the other side of the world, it is huge for us to be able to send instructions and receive confirmation at total opposite times of the day. It gives the management teams here in the USA the ability to send a mail with instructions ... and reduce the chance of middle-of-the-night phone conversations to resolve questions that come up during the working day in Asia. Since our e-mail is decentralized, and we have a 12-hour time difference between continents, we have that time as a pad in the event that an e-mail server is unavailable during a non-prime shift. So, in that instance, we have 84 hours per week in which we can incur downtime at any location, as long as the downtime occurs during a non-prime shift. So theoretically, even though I may think I require 99.8 % up time, I really could get away with only 50% to 75% uptime! "

If this reader's experience is typical of large, multinational organizations with decentralized messaging systems, it blows to pieces the conventional wisdom that messaging uptime is a significant consideration. However, could it be that this organization's experience is atypical? Or is this experience more typical of organizations whose messaging administration is decentralized? Or is it more typical of just manufacturing organizations? Or just multinationals?

We will be fielding a survey to our panel of IT professionals to determine some of the uptime issues involved in managing decentralized, multinational organizations and will report those findings in an upcoming column. In the meantime, I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on this issue.

Michael D. Osterman is the principal of Osterman Research, a market research firm that helps organizations understand the markets for messaging, directory and related products and services. He can be reached by clicking here.

Messaging archive
Past newsletters.

Message Management
Network World, 03/12/01

Dynamic clustering provides e-mail
Network World, 06/18/01