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Discussion on:
The 'real' cost of application outages

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steeleweed@... 29th Oct 2008
Downtime costs will naturally depend on the business. I worked many years at NYSE, where downtime could cost millions. I used to maintain and run one of their most critical systems. Over 7 years, the total 'unavailable' time was less than 50 seconds.

Now working in a small shop: 250-300 Intel-based servers (mostly Windows), a couple of IBM AS400s and one small z800 Mainframe running z/OS. On any given day, from one to several of the servers have availability issues, usually outright crashes, with outages ranging from 30 minutes to several hours.
The AS400's have some availability limitations in the middle of the night, but that is a result of the application design.

The mainframe has never crashed in the 8 years I've been running it. Any required outages are planned and usually very short. In that time, there have only been 7 or 8 significant (1 hour or more) planned outages and there are brief (10-30 minutes) quarterly outages, plus a monthly 20-minute outage required by the (admittedly) out-of-date- application design (I didn't design the application). And we do not make use of any mirroring or multiple-mainframe functionality available to mainframe hardware and software architecture.

Even planned outages to the servers are much more frequent.

There may be reasons to go the Intel-server route, but applications-availability is not one of them.
(Neither is I/O operations. No system does I/O like the mainframe).

If you want maximum uptime, go IBM Mainframe.
IBM mainframes are often called dinosaurs, but it is worth remembering that Homo Sapiens has only been around about 150 thousand years while dinosaurs were around 1000 times longer - and I question if we will still be around 150 million years from now.

"Most IT history of the last 20 years has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."
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