24x7

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com>]

Walt Lazear <lazear at mitre.org> writes:
> This came up in a discussion of "convergence" of voice,
> video, and data.  Someone woke up to the fact that if we put
> all those services on one LAN infrastructure, then that LAN
> MUST BE UP all the time.  What is the cost to keep up all
> the infrastructure pieces 7x24 and never let them go down?
> Remember, you can't even call the Help Desk if the LAN is 
> down (assuming phone service depends on it)! 

Most of my clients have been building networks with zero or near zero
permissible downtime for years. International banks have this funny
problem that there is virtually no time of day or night when something
doesn't need the network to be up.

This is hardly a new problem. The infrastructure costs to do this are
quite manageable, although certainly non-negligible.

This is even ignoring the fact that other related industries (such as
our friends in the telco industry) have been providing even more
reliable service for many, many years.

Perry