Comments on: In measuring the downtime of a server does it matter if it is a planned or unplanned downtime

By: bodhost

bodhost — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:25:56 +0000

Unplanned downtime means that server has some issues. Planned downtime usually belongs to hardware upgrade/ backup/ server maintenance/etc … but one thing is clear downtime is downtime, however, if this your main concern, then you can opt load balancing servers or server mirroring solution, where one server play the role of master server and second one act like a slave server. So in case master server goes down due to any reason slave server takes it place without any downtime. For more information you can check this link : Load Balanced Servers … Hopefully helpful.

By: jim4522

jim4522 — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:03:47 +0000

TomLiotta, Thanks for your response. If you have the time look at my new question about the relationship of uptime to downtime. Jim4522

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 02:06:19 +0000

…would it make a difference if the downtime is planned or unplanned.

That would depend on the purpose of the measurement.

If you simply need to measure how much time the system was available for handling business processing, it doesn’t matter much what the reason was for downtime. You aren’t actually measuring downtime in that case; you’re actually measuring uptime.

If you are attempting to quantify how much downtime is used for administrative (planned) work and how much is used for unplanned work, then of course the difference is important.

A higher amount of unplanned downtime might indicate there are reliability problems with hardware, software or people. A higher amount of planned downtime (that is troublesome) might indicate that processes need to be changed.

It depends on why you are gathering measurements in the first place.

Tom