Impressive
99.996% uptime means no more than 3.456 seconds per day downtime. Believable?
Telefonica Digital has launched a cloud service from servers in Madrid and London, using kit from Joyent and promising faster scalability and greater reliability than the competition. Instant Servers promises 99.996% uptime and backed cash compensation. Telefonica also reckons its clouds can quadruple in capacity instantly, …
The key thing (which we're not told in the article) is over what period you measure it. My guess is a month, so you're allowed 1 minute 45 secs of downtime without incurring penalties - this would be close enough to 100% for most commercial purposes. But it could be measured over a year, permitting a single outage of 20 minutes, which might not be acceptable.
If you want to read the Ts&Cs, scroll down to Schedule II Para 3, and you shall find:
Portal Availability: percentage of time in which the Telefónica Digital Cloud Services Portal is running and giving access to the Client. The objective value is 99.996% yearly, 99.95% monthly.
Always read the small print.
I'm obviously still a bit confused about this cloud stuff - I'd have expected 5 9s availability to be the starting point for commercial contracts. I assume data is stored in multiple locations, so that a data centre failing doesn't cause more than a short pause in service ? I mean, thats 1980s technology.