Software as a Service Reliabilty Insights

Interesting blog post by J. Bruce Daley at The Enterprise Software Observer. He provides real world insights about uptime concerns at SalesForce.com.

Salesforce pushes its Oracle database pretty hard. At the moment the company claims to host 351,000 subscribers from 18,700 companies which makes the size of its database gargantuan. The result is millions and millions of queries and other database transactions a day.

While SalesForce isn't procurement software, the example illustrates one of the concerns with the application service provider model. What happens if the product gets so popular that uptime suffers?

Here are some actual statistics quoted in the article:

By almost any measure 99.5% is an impressive statistic, but with 44,640 minutes in the month it translates into almost 4 hours of downtime. For the full year, being available 99.5% of the time means Salesforce is not available for an entire work week.

Here is the link:

http://brucedaley.typepad.com/esofto/2006/02/database_proble.html