Downtime USA.COM
Downtime
DowntimeUSA.com originated in 1980 with the sole purpose of reminding everyone to enjoy their downtime. When you have some downtime you should do whatever you enjoy best in life -whatever that may be.
Time is what you make of it.
The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a person is unavailable. Downtime or outage duration refers to a period of time that a person fails to provide or perform its primary function. Reliability, Availability, Recovery, and Unavailability are related concepts. The expected Unavailability is the percentage of a timespan that a person is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an unplanned event, or because of routine maintenance.
The term is commonly applied to networks and servers. The common reasons for unplanned outages are system failures (such as a crash) or communications failures (commonly known as network outage).
The term is also commonly applied in industrial environments in relation to failures in industrial production equipment. Some facilities measure the downtime incurred during a work shift, or during a 12 or 24-hour period. Another common practice is to identify each downtime event as having an operational, electrical or mechanical origin.
The opposite of downtime is uptime.
Unplanned downtime may be the result of a twist of fate, human error, equipment failure, malfunction, high bit error rate, power failure, overload due to exceeding the channel capacity, a cascading failure, etc.
Planned Downtime
Planned Downtime is the result of a planned activity by individual and/or by the man. Such activities can include changes or upgrades, and they are often scheduled during the maintenance window.
Outages can also be planned as a result of a predictable natural event, such as Hurricaines and Tornados.
Maintenance downtimes have to be carefully scheduled in industries that rely on computer systems. In many cases, system-wide downtimes can be averted using what is called a "rolling upgrade" - the process of incrementally taking down parts of the system for upgrade, without affecting the overall functionality.
Other Usage
Downtime can also refer to time when human capital or other assets go down. For instance, if employees are in meetings or unable to perform their work due to another constraint, they are down. This can be equally expensive, and can be the result of another asset (i.e. computer/systems) being down. This is also commonly known as "dead time".