Long scheduled down time again! People are watching!

Screen capture upon Facebook down incident
(Sep. 24, 2010).

I received this notification from Cisco Network Academy mailing list. WOW! It's going down for 72 hours! That is 3 whole days!

Subject: Reminder: Scheduled Academy Connection Downtime begins January 8 (1 AM GMT)
...
Cisco Networking Academy is upgrading its data center infrastructure. This change will help Cisco in continuing to give you excellent services and support.

During the upgrade, Academy Connection and all Academy Connection services will be unavailable for 72 hours. The outage will start Friday Jan 7th at 5 pm and finish on Monday Jan 10th at 5 pm (San Francisco (-8 GMT)).
...

I would not be surprised if it is just some other academy. However, this is "Cisco" Network Academy!

Facebook, a free service, recovered within 2.5 hours in unscheduled down incident on September 24, 2010. Unless one system have more users than Facebook, or, is more complex than that on Facebook, I expect one system's scheduled and unscheduled down time should also be near around 2.5 hours.

Why not make use of your own great solutions such as UCS to host your own Academy Connection service? Invest a little more is not an extra expense. It would become a proof of concept! A success and highly available Academy Connection is a great live demo of your own solutions!

I really hope no more such long scheduled down time notifications, for Cisco Network Academy Connection!