Hi-Tech Series : Five Nines is for Wimps

Five Nines refers to 99.999% uptime for computers. Uptime is an Industry Standard in the Hi-Tech world that measures the time that a computer system runs between unscheduled down time. Scheduled down times are called maintenance windows while any unscheduled down time is considered an Outage. Two Nines allows for 3 days downtime a year, while Three Nines equals 8 hours, Four Nines is 50 minutes and Five Nines means only 5 minutes downtime per year. Anything more than that is a joke because you can't really measure 5 seconds per year which would eqal Six Nines or 99.9999%.

Most companies are happy to have 99% uptime but some have spent large amounts of time and money in the quest to get to 99.9% and so on in search the holy grail of uptime the infamous five nines: 99.999%. Everyone agrees it would be pointless to go any further. But not my new Boss, oh no, his first remark in the first meeting was: "Five Nines is for Wimps, we are going for 100%." He might as well have said 111% since it is well known you can't get there without spending more than we can afford.

Every new Boss has to make noise like a genius and they always start out with an "All Hands" meeting so they can lay out their agenda. The last new boss was going to make his mark by getting everyone a new laptop. He had the right idea but the wrong brand, we had to switch back to Lenovo after HP couldn't support our needs. HP is better for servers but Lenovo is best for laptops. The boss before that made an equally epic failure when he insisted on upgrading the company Windows version. Once again the right idea but the wrong version; too bad he chose Vista. That was his first and last mistake.

Then there was the Boss who demanded there shall be “No simple outages”. It was true we had suffered a series of avoidable breakdowns but we all knew he should be careful what he wished for and sure enough we stopped all the simple breakdowns and started on the big complicated outages. There was no going back after that and we soon had another new Boss.

This process has been going on all the way back to the Y2k panic at the turn of the Millennium. As soon as things settled down there was a move to switch to linux which we did do in spite of the complaints and protests from the existing unix departments. That new Boss was promoted to Vice President and everyone agreed he was brilliant. Later on that same Boss decided we should get rid of Windows which we did not do in spite of years spent wasting time and money on the effort. He is no longer considered brilliant or Boss.

I'm looking forward to the arrival of the next new Boss because I know it will continue a long standing tradition of starting out with some hair brain scheme that is bound to exasperate and entertain us at the same time.