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How reliable is your system?

The average business owner doesn’t always take into account what is meant by terms thrown out at them. Have you heard about five nines? If you haven’t, you haven’t been listening to your telecommunication vendor. It’s a real catch phrase with them.

But what is Five Nines? What does it really mean?

You probably know that it stands for the reliability of the system. But do you know that it means 99.999% up time?

Yes, Five Nines means the system will be up and functioning for 99.999% of the time. The time it relates to is a period of 365 days or 1 year.

So how much time would your system allowed to be down, or out of service, to meet the requirement of Five Nines?

If a system were up only 99% of the time, also known as Two Nines, it would be out of service for 3 days, 15 hours, 40 minutes.

For Three Nines or 99.9%, it would be 8 hours, 46 minutes.

For Four Nines or 99.99%, it would be 52 minutes, 36 seconds.

And for Five Nines or 99.999%, drum role please, 5 minutes, 15 seconds.

Looking at these figures, it’s obvious why they boast about Five Nines reliability.

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