Any successful business has to “keep the trains running on time”. Ten years back, in our industry, the focus was on telephone service outages. Now the focus is on web site outages.
A few days back Pingdom published a report measuring total 2007 downtime to date for the top 20 sites on the web as ranked by Alexa. Leading the list is Yahoo with zero downtime. Amazon has 21 mins of downtime which makes them 7th (among top 20) in terms of outage performance.
I am sure things will get better. Below is a chart of telephone network performance (taken from here). This lists outages lasting 30 minutes or longer and affecting 30,000 or more subscribers. You can see that the telephone network became progressively more reliable as number of lines grew.
I have written earlier in the post “The New Data Center Leading-Edge” about how the consumer companies like eBay, Google, Yahoo and Amazon are creating a new “lean” data center model that is reliable, scaleable and cost-effective.
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