[pdenya]

Link bait headline. Obviously the issue here is that Data Centers are not reliable enough. A good failover option is necessary but generators and UPSs don't represent the primary costs behind data centers, removing them won't come close to cutting prices in half.

The point seems to be to expect failure and make sure you're prepared but increasing the likely hood of failures for a slight decrease in cost is not a good way to go about it.

[mbreese]

I think that the argument is that since the data center is "reliable enough", you don't feel the need to adequately test your failover option/procedures. If you knew that your data center would go down more frequently, you would better test your failover.

The question then becomes, when is it economically more viable to use multiple low(er) availability data centers as opposed to one hyper available one? (And since you should be designing for data center failover anyway, that is a fixed cost).