Availability


Availability

Electrical Grids

“Five Nines”

99.999% (“5 Nines”) uptime, means less than 5.26 minutes downtime on a year-basis.

Telecom

How Achieved

How the telecom industry is able to provide high availability systems is illustrated by the following figure:

(“Introduction to DC Power, Telecom and Datacom Applications”, 2004-09-25. Included here with approval from original author and content owner.)

Key components for achieving high availability solutions include:

  • Backups (in this case alternative power sources like batteries, generator, wind, sun, …)
  • Support systems like
    • Access control and security, to prohibit unwanted visitors
    • Climate control for equipment
    • Fire detection and suppression
    • Monitoring, and remote control – periodic tests of batteries, remote running of generators, and such)