Letter to the editor
In "The
price of (near) perfection" [Federal Computer Week, Aug. 28, 2000], the
chief information officer at Goddard Space Flight Center, Milton Halem,
asked what it would cost to give Goddard's e-mail servers "99.999 percent"
reliability.
I submit that no organization can reasonably justify the cost of providing
a maximum of 5.526 seconds of downtime per year for e-mail. It's one thing
to require perfection in heart valves and quite another for computer systems.
Instead of reaching for nirvana at taxpayer expense, NASA should first
determine its real need for uptime and then look at options. The General
Services Administration's advocacy of requirements analysis and analysis
of alternatives is just common sense.
Victor H. Agresti
Senior Program Manager
Justice Department