Exactly five years ago I published survey results showing target uptime SLAs and actual uptime measurements. I re-ran the survey a few weeks ago to see what’s changed, if anything, in the space of five years, and here are the results.
24×7 Systems
Other responses:
- 1 x 99.95%
Non 24×7 Systems
Other responses:
- 7 x “No target or target unknown”
- 1 x “0830 – 1730 M-Sat”
Other values:
- 1 x “n/a”
Summary
Well, the good thing is that this survey had almost twice the number of respondents as the 2009 survey, but that could just be that a lot more people read my blog now than five years ago.
My takeaway from the data is that nothing has really changed over the last five years. Given the really low response rate to the survey (when I usually get more than 2-300 responses for a typical survey), my inference is that the majority of you out there don’t have well-defined uptime targets (or recovery time objective service level agreements, RTO SLAs, or whatever you want to call it) and so didn’t respond to the survey. The same thing happens when surveying something like backup testing frequency – where you *know* you’re supposed to do it, but don’t do it enough so feel guilty and don’t respond to the survey.
For those of you that responded, or didn’t respond and do have targets, well done! For those of you that don’t have targets, I don’t blame you, I blame the environment you’re in. Most DBAs I know that *want* to do something about HA/DR are prevented from doing so by their management not placing enough importance on the subject, from talking to a bunch of you. This is also shown by the demand for our various in-person training classes: IE2 on Performance Tuning is usually over-subscribed even though it runs 3-4 times per year, but IE3 on HA/DR has only sold out once even though we generally run it only once per year.
Performance is the number one thing on the collective minds of most I.T. management, not HA/DR planning, and that’s just wrong. Business continuity is so crucial, especially in this day and age of close competition where being down can cause fickle customers to move to a different store/service provider.
If you’re reading this and you know you don’t have well-defined uptime targets then I strongly encourage you to raise the issue with your management, as it’s likely that your entire HA/DR strategy is lacking too. For more information, you can read the results post from the survey five years ago (Importance of defining and measuring SLAs).
Don’t wait until disaster strikes to make HA/DR a priority.
