While not losing a customer’s data is a storage system’s most important task, it must also ensure such data is always readily available for access and processing.

In theory, storage systems are designed for 100% reliability—but in practice, vendors haven’t always been quite able to reach that goal. For example, 99.9995% still falls just a hair short in terms of 100% availability.

But what do five, six or even seven nines of reliability really mean to organizations who must rely upon storage systems for their daily business operations?

In this guide, we explore the “rule of nines” for single-storage and storage cluster systems—and how a distributed, shared-everything architecture can help your organization achieve maximum uptime year-round.