Archive for September, 2008

Carrier Class = 5?

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

What makes a system “Carrier Class” (as in Telecoms Carrier)?? The answer is subjective of course but a few idle ideas popped into my head that I thought worth wasting a few lines for.

  • 5 Nines Reliability, i.e. 99.999% uptime or 8.76 hours/year downtime (although hardware targetted at carriers usually quotes 6 Nines),
  • 10^5 transactions/second on server infrastructure costing less than 10^5 dollars,
  • 10^5 user capacity,
  • 10 x 5 simultaneous calls per second,