

Are there any five nines hosted database services? - aaronrc

There are a few hosted database services around but the ones I've looked at cater for web apps. My app is a VoIP/telecoms one and I need a five nines SLA, are there any that meet that?
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kochbeck
Er, yes, but I'm not sure if this will be a satisfying answer:

If you contact IBM Global Services, they have a group that can put together a
hosted database proposal with very stringent uptime guarantees. Most likely
they'll push for you to be hosted on z10 (mainframe) architectures and DB2.
They can run it across a multi-site SYSPLEX in multiple tightly controlled
data centers. They've got a handful of customers who have been continuously up
since at least the late 1980s in a config like this.

This topic came up at OpsU in SF a couple weeks ago. I think the consensus
from all was that looking for "five-9s" is a very bad proxy for asking the
question, "What is the cost-benefit of downtime mitigation strategies?" I've
worked on systems that required (either because of regulation or health and
safety) appreciably 100% uptime. The cost for near-perfect uptime almost never
balances against the cost of downtime including lost revenue, lost customer
confidence and the like.

Now, one of those applications did happen to be a telecom application (a
switch), and there was, before deregulation, a universally accepted
requirement that billing records must continuously capture 99.999% of the
time. No clue if that still exists, but if that's you, there are about a
kajillion preexisting solutions to this problem, and many of them are hosted.

The Magic 8-Ball says: Concentrate harder and ask again. :-)

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brk
Better question is: Is there any hosted _anything_ that actually _delivers_
five 9's?

Most SLAs are crap. Yay, you get a credit of $50 for our 8 hours of downtime.
If you're building a mission critical service based on Some 3rd party SLA,
you're in for a world of hurt.

~~~
aaronrc
For application layer servers the 5 9's redundancy can be achieved by
deploying multiple servers. Deploying a multiple server redundant database is
a difficult problem which distracts from the main application. Hence the
desire for a hosted option.

