Oracle's policies document gives notice of 10-hour outages

Oracle's Cloud Enterprise Hosting and Delivery Policies document states the service could be down for ten hours at a time, it has been discovered.

Fortune revealed the rather big change in the company's policies and questioned Oracle's permitted outage, which the document said will happen one Friday a month, starting at 8pm, though Oracle told Cloud Pro the document describes a "worst-case scenario".

"Oracle reserves specific maintenance periods for changes that may require the Cloud Service to be unavailable during the maintenance period," the document reveals.

"Oracle works to ensure that change management procedures are conducted during scheduled maintenance windows, while taking into consideration low traffic periods and geographical requirements. The typical scheduled maintenance period is once a month on Friday, initiating at approximately 20:00 data centre local time, lasting around 10 hours."

Although the company has tried to mitigate the impact it will have on companies by scheduling the maintenance to happen while most companies are offline, it could potentially have some damaging effects on any companies that need 100 per cent uptime, depending on which part of infrastructure will undergo maintenance.

The flaw was discovered by an IT consultant who works with Oracle government accounts and decided to voice his concerns to the business news source.

“This seems wildly off,” he wrote in an email to Fortune. “I can’t believe I could spend $2,000 a month for a two-zone Oracle Enterprise [relational database management system] RDBMS and have 10 hours outages a month—plus any unscheduled time.”

An Oracle spokesman told Cloud Pro: “That document is a statement of policy that reflects the worst-case scenario and not the actual performance of Oracle’s Cloud Platform. Most of Oracle’s critical services like compute, Database-as-a-Service, Storage Service, Java Cloud Services have zero planned downtime in the foreseeable future.”