What is High Availability? Four 9's vs Three 9's

Thanks to the cloud, our applications, platforms, services and even media are easier to access than ever. As long as you have an internet connection, you can log into a system that saves your work, or your spot in that Netflix movie, for a consistent experience across all your devices.

Men hvad sker der, når disse tjenester går ned? Det viser sig, at det kan koste os en del penge. For organisationer, der er afhængige af cloud-løsninger for at få deres arbejde gjort, kan nedetid i tjenesten føre til et snævert produktivitetsfald – og vi behøver ikke at fortælle dig, hvordan det kan påvirke din bundlinje.

Det er derfor, det er så vigtigt at finde en tjeneste, du kan stole på, en der kan garantere oppetid og love "høj tilgængelighed" - men det er her, det bliver vanskeligt.

Mange af os ved måske ikke engang, hvordan man definerer "høj tilgængelighed". Vi kan blive vildledt af markedsføringskopi, der hævder "99 % oppetid!" eller endnu bedre, "99,9 % oppetid!" Men hvad betyder dette tal helt præcist? Lad os se nærmere.

What is high availability?

When we talk about the guaranteed uptime of a service what we are really discussing is the availability of that service.

High availability refers to the accessibility of a system, solution or application that can operate without any interruptions for an extended period of time.

Når vi taler om cloud-tjenester, vil tilgængelighed altid blive målt i procent. Det, vi typisk ser, er tilgængelighed målt mellem 99% og 100%.

Therefore, any service with 100% uptime should be available 24/7/365 without interruption -- meaning a system that never fails. Now, this is pretty rare. But on the flip side, any service with availability under 99% should offer a little bit of a warning sign -- you may want to consider what about their service prevents it from reaching that 99% standard?

Four 9's vs three 9's

On the surface, the difference between 99.99% and 99.9% availability may not seem like much of a dramatic difference. But when you drill down into exactly what these figures mean, the real story begins to show.

Utilizing a simple uptime calculator, we can gain a better understanding of what these measurements mean:

As you can tell, the difference between 99.99% availability and 99.9% availability means an additional 7 hours of acceptable downtime for that service everywhere. That breaks down further to 1 minute and 26 seconds of downtime everyday, or 10 minutes and 48 seconds every week.

Så på overfladen kan forskellen mellem fire 9'ere og tre 9'ere virke som en enkelt ni. Men i virkeligheden kan det betyde forskellen mellem garanteret service hele året, eller acceptabelt 8 timers nedetid.

Calculating the cost of downtime

So what, you may be thinking. Only 8 hours out of an entire year? What's the big deal? Well, the big deal is how much it could cost your business.

According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime is estimated around $5,600 per minute. Multiply that by 60, and you're at $350,000 per hour.

Lad os nu gange det igen med de 8 timers accepteret nedetid med en garanti på 99,9 %.

$2,800,000. That’s right. $2.8 million.

Therefore, if your business's application or tools are unavailable for 8 hours per year, it might end up costing you over $2 million.

So, how can we make sure this doesn't happen? First off, find a provider that offers over 99.9% availability. But beyond that, this is where a Service Level Agreement will come in as your safety net.

Beskyt din investering med en serviceniveauaftale

Life happens. It's as simple as that, and we can't always get around it.

Weather, natural disasters, ISP outages or cyber attacks are all examples of interruptions that can bring service down unexpectedly. That is why you'll want to search for a provider that stands behind their availability guarantee with a Service Level Agreement.

A service level agreement is a contract between the service provider and your business to define the expectations of the platform, the level of quality the service provides, and even availability of the solution.

SLA's will generally include specific agreements on availability and uptime of the service, and performance metrics or benchmarks to compare your business' experience against.

How Smartling ensures high availability

Through the use of our Global Delivery Network (GDN) translation proxy, Smartling is responsible for delivering our client's translated content to the end user. And since no one wants their brand website to go down, it's on us to make sure that never happens. With 99.99% uptime your Smartling-powered site will experience no more than 52 minutes and 35.7 seconds of downtime per year.

Dette er alt sammen opnået gennem Smartlings unikke arkitektur af GDN. Takket være Elastic Load Balancing fra Amazon Web Services, samt redundanser i vores infrastruktur, kan Smartling sikre en pålidelig oplevelse, der kan skaleres efterhånden som trafikken til din hjemmeside ændres.

Ved at bruge især Elastiske Load Balancers kan Smartling endda skalere vores sammen med din virksomhed, efterhånden som behovene ændrer sig, samtidig med at vores enestående tilgængelighed på 99,99 % bibeholdes.

That's in major contrast from other TMS and content delivery platforms that simply promise 99.9%, or even less availability.

The Bottom Line

So, if you’re looking for a reliable, scalable and highly available platform for delivering your translated content, then look no further than Smartling. Chat with one of our experts today to learn more!