Who Cares About Five-Nines?Who Cares About Five-Nines?

You should. Here's why.

In his last two posts on No Jitter (here and here), Terry Slattery has asked the question, "Do you want a five-nines network?" He's basically treated it as a rhetorical question, writing from the assumption that you do, or at least that you should. He concedes at the beginning of his first piece that most enterprise networks don't reach the 99.999% uptime level, and over the course of the two posts he offers suggestions for getting closer to that goal--from policing the proliferation of OS versions to the need for a good test lab with proper procedures and equipment.

But what about Terry's underlying question: Do you want a five-nines network? Is it worth all the effort that he describes? If users are accustomed to a lower caliber of service, will they really notice the improvement?

And it's not just that users have adjusted to less-than-almost-perfect reliability on the enterprise LAN/WAN, going back to the days when the "data" network, as we used to call it, would regularly go down and heads would pop up over cubicle walls--"Network's down..." "Yeah, me too..." "Again?..."

Overall, our standards have declined, thanks mostly to mobile networks. In the old days, you wouldn't have accepted it if you'd picked up your landline phone and found you didn't have "coverage," or that the connection was literally unusable because of poor voice quality. And it isn't even just mobile networks lowering our standards--how many times in the last couple of months have you had to unplug your home Internet modem and restart it because you lost connectivity? Remember when the telcos and cable companies used to sell us on their "always on" Internet service?

Nor is this a general lowering-of-standards issue. The amount of enterprise work being done over mobile and home Internet connections is only growing, at the expense of on-site networks.

So is it worth it to aim for five-nines? I think it is, at least for large enterprises that have the IT horsepower to devote to it, and for VARs and others who serve smaller enterprises that may lack that level of internal staffing.

For one thing, I think it's important to raise our standards for all connectivity as we head into the era of the Cloud. Services or assets based in the cloud are useless if the connectivity needed to access them has failed. Ask any small businessperson or full-time work-at-homer who relies on Google and various other freemium services--when that home Internet connection hiccups, the result can be, if not disaster, a lot of lost time.

And for enterprise networks, you'll be carrying a lot more video traffic as time goes by. Some of this will be sports tournaments and cat videos, but a lot of it will be real work product, and a highly reliable network is essential if you want to capture the collaboration benefits of video. The same goes for Web conferencing traffic. While there may be some such collaborative traffic that never touches the enterprise network--mobile-worker-to-home-worker, say--this will be a distinct minority. In a conference featuring multiple people in multiple locations, the odds are that a significant number of them will be in an office somewhere.

So yes, five-nines is as important to enterprise networks today as it was to the PSTN years ago. If you aim for this lofty goal, your users...I was going to say they'll thank you, but they probably won't, because they won't think of you at all. Which isn't so bad, really.