DocMagic Inc. has announced that the company has maintained a perfect 100 percent uptime record for the past 120 days. DocMagic provides system status information on its Web site in real time. Over the past 12 months, DocMagic has maintained an unparalleled 99.989 percent uptime record. That period of time includes the company’s move to their new location and switch-over to the new state-of- the-art technology center resulting in the new 100 percent uptime record.
"Some service providers and IT executives will say that 100 percent uptime is an impossible standard," said Dominic Iannitti, CEO of DocMagic. "I can assure you that it is possible and meeting this standard involves investment in infrastructure, superior staff training, constant monitoring and an unwavering commitment to the task."
When it comes to measuring online service reliability, the terms uptime and availability are often used interchangeably. However, they are not always the same thing. Often providers that measure uptime only check to see if a server is responding to pings on the network. In some cases, a server may be "up" but unable to perform the service for which it was designed.
At DocMagic, uptime means that all company services are functional and available to its customers not just that the servers are turned on. To test this, DocMagic developed a proprietary system that sends complete transaction requests of all types through the system continuously 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As these requests flow through the system, company technicians monitor more than 1,000 data points that impact service delivery and quality. Any potential problems are identified and addressed before they can escalate and pose a risk to the entire system.
Measuring uptime with any method that does not include the actual delivery of the company's service, results in a meaningless metric that will not contribute to the company’s high service availability standards. Customers should require service providers to provide uptime information. DocMagic publishes its status, including uptime, processing statistics and bandwidth, in real time on its Web site.
Uptime is commonly measured as a percentage, to as many decimal points of precision as possible. The higher the precision, the more digits after the decimal point. IT managers strive to get 100 percent uptime, but usually settle for as many “nines” as they can get. For example, 90 percent uptime is considered to be one "nine," 99 percent is considered two "nines," 99.9% is considered three "nines," and so on. Even though it may seem insignificant to add just one more digit of precision, it is actually quite significant as adding a single nine represents a huge jump in uptime and availability. For example, the difference between 99 percent and 99.9 percent is 78.84 hours of additional uptime over the course of a year. At DocMagic we measure uptime using five "nines" as our precision standard. Achieving 99.999 percent uptime translates to approximately five minutes of downtime over an entire year. Our goal is to deliver 100 percent uptime, all of the time."
