Availability Metric Elaborated

[Aokramer]

There is a previous comment about availability but I had a different comment on the section which is why I opened a new issue.

In the section titled “New Metric: Availability” it states the “Federal Government should be prepared to deliver the same level of service as that provided by private sector data centers” however there is no elaboration on what availability or uptime metric will be expected from the Federal Government in its own data centers.

In the commercial sector it is standard practice to have a contractual service level agreement (SLA) between a data center provider and their client offering guaranteed facility uptime with options such as 99.9, 99.999% and even up to 100% uptime/availability, however there is no reference to the desired uptime in the DCOI as well as no reference to the actual, verifiable, facility construction and installed infrastructure supporting the delivery of the desired uptime/availability.

Industry has looked at the difference from 99.9 up to 100% uptime/availability, with an eye on the business costs associated with different levels of availability. What businesses have realized is that anything less than 100% uptime/availability in their facility requires programers to add application redundancy while adding exponential costs to equipment in order to accommodate for an outage in a facility with less than 100% uptime/availability by requiring equipment redundancy. There are also associated costs with downtime as well as many case studies about the failure of a disaster recovery facility and/or backup facility to pick up workload from a data center that has gone down without any application interruption.

Since there are commercially available, 100% uptime facilities, built to Tier 4 constructed standards available today, there is no need to lower the contractual standard to 99.9 and/or a Tier 3 facility.
Given the mission critical nature of data centers for the Federal Government we would ask for clarity on this section as well as a recommendation that the Federal Government require a contractual 100% uptime SLA with the data center provider that is supported by the industry matrix of Tier 4. A Tier 4 facility can, with certainty, achieve the 100% uptime requirement and is designed to be "fault tolerant."

The footprint of IT will be drastically reduced as the application failover, facility requirement, will be kept to a logical minimum.