Today's desire for full-time and uninterrupted Web access and response is a de facto standard that too many users see as normal service. However, achieving and maintaining this availability level requires a careful examination. This analysis is too easily lost in the corporate responsibility shuffle. As Rash indicates, reliability and availability must be measured from the customer's perspective. I may be partial because I work for an Internet infrastructure company, but I really enjoyed reading Wayne Rash's Nov. 27 column.
Internet users tolerate issues of scalability.
This will change, however, as the Web continues to become a part of our everyday lives. Calif. Support Is Critical Wayne Rash's Nov. 27 column really tells it like it is. It's not just the technology, either. All those people who touch the environment and all the processes that run it must be, respectively, trained and defined with high availability in mind. And Rash is right when he suggests that 90 percent reliability is nowhere near enough.