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Reliability concerns make datacenters resilient to commoditization. A datacenter that’s available 90% of the time is worth vastly, vastly less than 90% as much
by dodobirdlord 6y ago
Reliability concerns make datacenters resilient to commoditization. A datacenter that’s available 90% of the time is worth vastly, vastly less than 90% as much as one that 99.95% of the time. Commodity businesses are largely built on presumptions of linearity. Produce 90% as much corn/iron/wood/widgets as you expected and you’ll probably make something like 90% of the money you expected. Produce a 90% available datacenter and you’ll have a hard time finding anyone willing to pay you anything. And that’s just availability, not to mention data durability, which is even more critically nonlinear.
- echelon 6y agoThen you should be able to sue your provider for breaches in SLA. 0.5% downtime should void the bill. I think presently the providers are getting all the upside. High margin, perpetual lock-in, and no consequences.
- freeone3000 6y agoYou can sue your provider for breaches in SLA. The rebate you automatically get likely exceeds what you'd otherwise recover. (Which is why they grant one). SLA payouts are usually very generous - I've gotten credit for the entire month for a one-hour outage of a service. I don't know where this idea that cloud providers and other DCs don't pay out for SLA agreements is, but they absolutely do.
- dnautics 6y ago> A datacenter that’s available 90% of the time is worth vastly, vastly less than 90% as much as one that 99.95% of the time. That depends on your workload and the nature of the loss of availability. Is the completed work still there but just unreachable for an hour every few months? That might be okay for some folks. Is your data center always available mon-fri but constantly has scheduled downtime on weekends? Might still be okay.