by Alec Muffett
ok, so, accoring to dave walker i am not the only person who has a personal gripe about the marketing cliche, 24x7x365
dave prefers plain 24×7 (ditto) – or 24×365 (which is a little implausible to my tastes)
i’d prefer 24x7x52 which is at least a calendar year (modulo leap years, which would make it more accurate to say 24x7x52.17746 for the year length of 365.2422)
anybody else?
I actually think that 24x7x365 is a reasonable way to express that it’s 24×7 <em>including holidays</em>, since there are 24×7 operations that close for Christmas and possibly other holidays as well.
Agree. Marketing cliches are usually meaningless. But: 24x7x365 should mean exactly 7 years of uniterrupted work. Not bad 🙂
You saw it on the back of those shirts at J1 too, didn’t you.
Glares at me like a misplaced apostrophe: http norman.walsh.name/2004/07/01/newlow
i was not at java one; what happened?
ah – i see, no this has been a bugbear of mine for several years now, and can call several marketing execs to attest that i have harangued them regularly regarding it.
Reminds me of 99.999% – 5 minutes downtime claims. No technology can offer that if the process isn’t in place. I was in a datacentre recently where rain fell through the roof into a Sun E10K. Remarkably, it kept running. Naturally, they had to replace it, however their DR procedure dealt with migrating one domain, not the entire platform. Chaos ensued. Technology can’t provide these kind of guarantees alone.
One ISP I’ve looked at recently offers 99.92% – that’s 420 minutes (7 hours) a year downtime – still pretty impressive, but already a long way off 99.999%
For reference: 90% ~= 36.5 days, 80% ~= 73 days downtime. Impressive-sounding figures aren’t actually very impressive.
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