Linus Tech Tips

"Six nines" is practically a meme in the IT infrastructure and DevOps world, and has nothing at all to do with any kind of sex joke. For years "six nines" has been touted as the pinnacle SLA target for high availability and uptime of services. You'll find references all over the Internet to this SLA from all kind of companies, both big and small, in their marketing.

Examples from a quick and random Google search:

• "NetApp’s six nines guarantee": https://www.netapp.com/blog/asa-san-storage/
• "CenturyLink Targets Six Nines": https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/1106/centruylink_six_nines.pdf
• "HPE Get 6-Nines Guarantee [...]": https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/4aa5-2846enw

Companies such as Microsoft, Amazon (AWS specifically) and Google tout the "six nines" as their HA SLA in loads of their marketing, and it's easy to find.

I could go on forever but that should give you an idea. You can read more about "The Rule Of Nines" here if you're interested: https://vastdata.com/blog/the-rule-of-nines

My point is, this isn't a figure they made up for a sex joke. It's a very real SLA that is explicitly touted in IT marketing all over the Internet and has been for some time.

So where does the "innuendo" come from then? The uninformed viewer's own imagination, I think. Because from my perspective, I just see an IT guy trying to brag about how he's going to ensure his infrastructure reaches a slick "six nines" target for high availability, snapping his fingers and showboating the camera in pride about it.

It's up to the viewer to interpret what they see, of course, but it's also wrong once you know what the true intention more likely was to continue to insist that it was something else entirely. If anything, what he really meant is inconclusive, I personally think it's a real stretch to assume it was a sex joke.