Final answer:
The 'five nines' availability of a network equates to about 5.26 minutes of downtime per year, which is 0.001% of the total annual minutes.The maximum downtime per year for a network with 'five nines' of availability is approximately 5.26 minutes.
Step-by-step explanation:
When a network is said to have 'five nines' of availability, this refers to the network being operational 99.999% of the time within a year.
To calculate the maximum downtime per year, we first determine the total number of minutes in a year, which is 525,600 minutes (365 days * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour). We then calculate 0.001% of this time for the downtime, which is 525,600 minutes * 0.001% or approximately 5.256 minutes. Therefore, the correct answer is option b) 5.26 minutes.