GlenH, the good thing about my sentence (Downtime is downtime) is that it is always true because it is a tautology. Seriously, I certainly agree with you. There usually is a big difference between a scheduled reboot and a system crash and not only because a crash might destroy data or the system configuration. I exaggerated a little in my article because I find those constant reboots quite annoying. However, it also depends on the environment. It might not be an issue if you reboot an internal file server during the night. It is something different, though, if you have to shutdown a web server that is supposed to be online 24 hours a day.

I have to disagree with this statement. Downtime in the middle of the night, on a weekend, for a scheduled update, when no users are on the system, is a LOT different than downtime (e.g., a crash) during critical business hours.

I wish everyone would start being clear about the difference. I want to see “maintenance times” vs. “crash (down) times.” My downtime due to crashes over the last three years is more along the lines of zero (for most servers) to a few minutes per year and certainly no where near nine hours per year.