[cpitman]

Businesses always ask for High Availability, but they never agree on what that actually means. IE, does HA mean "Disaster Recovery", in which case rebuilding the system after an incident could qualify? Does it require active-active runtimes? Multiple data centers? Geographic distribution?

And by the way, how much are they willing to spend on their desired level of availability?

I still need a better way to run these conversations, but I'm trying to find a way to bring it back to cost. How much does an hour of downtime really cost you?

[carlsborg]

Agree - different business functions have different availability goals. An system that computes live risk for a trading desk might have different availability goals from an HR services portal.