What Is High Availability?

The availability continuum depicted in Figure 39.1 shows a general classification of availability based on the amount of downtime an application can tolerate without impacting the business. You would write your service-level agreements (SLAs) to support and try to achieve one of these continuum categories.

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FIGURE 39.1 Availability continuum.

Topping the chart is the extreme availability category, so named to indicate that this is the least tolerant category and is essentially a zero (or near zero) downtime requirement (that is, sustained 99.5% to 100% availability). The mythical five-nines falls at the high end of ...

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