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Outages Leave Google Apps Admins In the Hotseat
snydeq writes "This week's Google outages left several Google Apps admins in the lurch — and many of them are second-guessing their advocacy for making the switch to hosted apps, InfoWorld reports. The outages, which affected both Gmail and Apps, 'could serve as a deterrent to some IT and business managers who might not be ready to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their servers,' according to the article. 'If we began to experience a similar outage more than about two or three business hours per quarter, we'd probably make Google Apps and Gmail a backup solution to a locally hosted mail system, if we used it at all,' said one Apps admin. 'And it would likely be years before we'd try a cloud-based collaborative system again from any vendor.' Coupled with recent Apple and Amazon cloud issues, these Google outages are being viewed by some as big wins for Microsoft."
isnt there any other vendor out there providing business solutions ? its not like everyone is going to jump into exchange wagon because they couldnt do with google apps. geez.
Read radical news here
When my boss tells me he wants 0 downtime (or even five-9 downtime), I show him a quote for the 7-figure cost of creating such a system.
Apparently Google is expected to hit that level of uptime all while charging either nothing for their standard edition or $50 per user per year for the premier.
I wonder how much downtime the companies that are using Google Apps would experience if they had to pay for their own redundancy?
I'm a big tall mofo.
It is not a big win for Microsoft, it is a big win for corps hosting their own app servers. I would think that eventually Google will release google apps on a server that corps could install in their own data centers.
The issue is simple:
How do you make money with hosting applications? Simple - the more customers you have, the more money you make. It scales with the size of the customer base.
That means you, as a single customer, are insignificant. And that shows daily when dealing with any large service provider.
On the other hand, with internal infrastructure, you either have a infrastructure service provider (most likely a local company, not to small and not to big), which cares about each of its customers.
Or, if you're a bit bigger, you have your own employees. These depend on doing their job because they need to eat - or pay that new LCD TV they bought ;)
Of course, hosted apps are cheaper as long as everything works. Which it won't, sooner or later.
we only have one or two unexpected downtimes per year
What about your planned downtime? If you're running Windows, you're rebooting to install patches on a regular basis or you're running unpatched systems. What about software installs?
In the context of the article, do you think the users of Google Apps (or any users) would be happy with, "Oh, no you don't understand. This is PLANNED downtime. This doesn't affect you or our downtime numbers."
you can have 0 unexpected downtime with a single server, if you are lucky.
You can win the lottery too, if you are lucky. How many people win the lottery though?
I'm a big tall mofo.
if your apps require 99.999 then you sure as heck shouldn't be using the cloud. Likewise, if you can provide similar capabilities in-house at $50 a seat.
Neither of the above applies to vast majority of businesses out there. Get used to having to balance cost, risk and features if you want to manage IT...
Google has a Service Level Agreement. If they have excessive downtime, you can get up to 15 days of free service. No refunds.
Tell that to your boss. It's not your problem. That's what the company signed up for. Welcome to "cloud computing".
Are the proponents of cloud apps so stupid they don't realise that a network can go down just as easily as a local app? I wouldn't mind betting that Google's outage rate is considerably less than the amount of time the average Word user has to go without Word for some reason.
What you have to take into account is the failure rate of all network segments between you and Google (or wherever). With the best will in the world you're not going to get 100%, ever. It's just a matter of comparing the figures and making the call.
Do you honestly believe that you or your employees are going to build a system with higher availability than Google? In the magical fantasy world we all wish we lived in, you may have the budget, skill, manpower, and infrastructure resources to do this. In the real world it is not even remotely possible. I know how much it sucks when your system is down and there's nothing you can do but wait on some status dashboard to from Red to Green. That said, we should recognize that while being frustrated at this lack of control is normal, that doesn't mean you actually could do it better. It's easy to say "this would have never happened if we were self-hosted" while never thinking about the bullets you dodged by running hosted applications.
That means you, as a single customer, are insignificant. And that shows daily when dealing with any large service provider.
The only thing that my service provider should care about is the availability of the platform. I am completely insignificant, but the only reason my hosted app would be down is if the platform is down, and that sure as hell is significant to them. The advantage of hosted applications and cloud computing is that no one needs to ever look at or touch my app, the platform is all that matters.
Yeah because we all know Microsoft's hallmarks are reliability and stability... bwahaha
you had me at #!
But then again: This is "just" e-mail.
GMail was down and that's "just" email as you say, but it was also Google Apps. Many businesses depend on that for their word processing, spreadsheeting and other Microsoft Office replacement needs.
The chance of having a single server run through a year is much, much higher than winning the lottery.
Sure, if you don't include planned downtime. But interconnected networks require higher security which requires regular patching which makes having a single server run through a year without any downtime at all nearly impossible (just like winning the lottery). Back in my Novell days, I had several Netware 3.12 systems with uptimes of 2-3 years.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Why yes, some raspberry vinaigrette or even a nice oil and vinegar would go wonderfully with that word salad.
we only have one or two unexpected downtimes per year.
Just like Google. You're making the parent's point nicely.
you had me at #!
I scan Slashdot nearly every day and didn't remember seeing anything about outages at Google this past week. A search through the story history confirmed that fact. So I thought I'd visit google.com and see what Google itself had to say. Nothing on the blog; nothing in the press section.
So why is this the first time these outages have been discussed here? From reading the article it appears we're talking about multiple outages over the past couple of weeks. Doing a Google search for "google outages" brings up one blog posting about these recent events. The blog posting includes this unsourced quotation, "Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said via e-mail that 'a small number' of Gmail users and 'some' Apps users were impacted by the problem, which is still outstanding and being worked on as of 5:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Friday."
So all these events seem rather shrouded in mystery. How big was the outage? What explanations did Google give for the outage? I've certainly had servers go down, lost network connectivity, etc., etc., but I don't maintain huge server farms with enormous redundancy and multiple high-bandwith connections to the Internet. I don't recall search on Google ever going down; what's up with gmail and Apps?
The suspicious among us might start to think that outside parties might be responsible. After all, if companies start migrating to the "cloud," disrupting those services could have a substantial, economy-wide impact.
Those IT manager using the free service and expecting mission critical uptime should really go out more often and get a grip on reality.
Let's see, to set up my own five/nine email servers I would need at least two hosting location on different backbone, each of them should have at least two redundant servers. And of course I should have one spare that I can ship express whenever one fail.
Fixed Cost (Investment)
Monthly Recurring Cost
Implementation time
Of course I pulled the numbers out of my hat but it should be enough to show that there is no way a SOHO will ever have the mean to do it and that it is unrealistic to expect that kind of service for free or cheap.
I don't know what these people compare to but Google in particular has stellar performance when it comes to keeping their stuff running. I could only dream of getting those uptimes and availability on our servers. First of all failsafe systems is very expensive, mostly insanely so. Second of all they demand enormous amount of staff and maintenance. Tossing a service into the mix or upgrading is a year long process.
The admins who complains about outsourced services are just trying to keep their jobs. When enough managers see that the service they paid through their nose to get is a bargain from Google admins will be in the hot seat indeed.
Other outsourced services might not be that good but Google is a very bad example if you want to badmouth cloud computing.
HTTP/1.1 400
We have all seen it. Ebay a couple of years ago going down due to Oracle corruption. Royal Bank of Canada failure due to an improper software upgrade. Now, Google with Gmail and other Google Apps failing. All of these organizations were geared towards having the highest uptimes available and failed spectacularly.
Whether you host your own or use someone else its the illusion of control that somehow clouds our judgment into believing that it would somehow be different if I did it. Example: Is it better to drive or fly? Pure numbers state that its safer to fly on a commercial carrier by an order of magnitude but somehow we feel safer when we drive. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not the world is full of 6 sigma events. As long as you are doing everything you can and within your budget when your hosting your own apps or auditing your provider to ensure they have, backup systems, redundancy, offsite bunker, etc. then you have done everything you can to prepare for this inevitability.
In a lot of ways designing systems is like playing poker. You can play your hand perfectly, design all the systems redundancy and recovery you like, but sometimes even after all that your opponent (risk) draws a lucky card on the river to beat you. Just because you got beat doesn't mean you shouldn't continue to play the same way, it just means you hit one of those events that you cannot plan.
Two weeks ago a transformer blew out in the building I work in. First there was no power for 3 hours, then temporary power as a large generator was hooked up, but it was not big enough to run the AC, so we did no turn on the servers. It took another day to get a large enough generator (about the size of a tractor trailer). In total, our business was shut down completely for a day and a half due.
I don't think you can even get a SLA from the power company.
Google Apps went down for 3 hours.
Shit happens.
We ran into one of these "gotcha" features in hosted Gmail that's been giving me fits and it all started with a simple mistake. I misspelled a user name. You can change the spelling in the admin module, but it doesn't change the spelling in the contacts and the misspelling still showed up when she logged in. So I tried deleting the user name and recreating the account.
Big mistake.
When you delete a user name you can't recycle it for five days, which pushed us past our roll out date. Their crip work-around is creating a mailing list with that user name. But that has its own set of problems, especially when trying to migrate a large number of users. There's no support unless you get the premium edition. So now we're stuck in the position of paying for support on a service we're not certain will work for us. I'm not inclined to throw money at something to see if it will work when what we're already paying for is working.
Unfortunately, it was one of our key sales people who already had that account name on her business cards. Rolling without her is a non-starter.
It's frustrating because I'm the one who recommended Google and I feel really let down. It's a stupid problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Even if there's a good reason for it, there should be a giant warning banner with a flashing red neon border warning you that deleting a user results in a five day lock out. Actually, it's been more than five days and I still can't recreate the account.
This one niggling little incident is making me rethink hosted applications. So, yeah, it does sort of benefit MS. Not in our case, we're using hosted SendMail instead of Exchange, but if this type of "feature" deters other companies already using MS solutions, then yeah. Who wants to take a chance on looking bad? There will still be outages with any solution but no one gets fired for recommending MSFT. There's a certain period of time that users are looking for an excuse not to like a new service, just because it's different. If you can get past that time frame, then a small outage can be overlooked. But those first few months have to be smooth. Maybe not flawless, but close to it.
It would almost be better if the free version was a trial and corporate users could get support from day one. This is just maddening. Shape up, Google.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Expecting five-9 or 0 downtime for a system used by only ONE company might be a very high expectation with a high cost vs. usage obtained from it afterwards.
But how many companies rely on Google's systems? When you offer your application or suite to the whole nation or WORLD, and campaign for its use - then YES, you do need to keep a very near-0 downtime to be really successful.
Dude ... the term is used exactly as it is supposed to in the summary...
"This week's Google outages left several Google Apps admins in the lurch - and many of them [use hindsight in criticizing] their advocacy for making the switch to hosted apps, InfoWorld reports."
Try knowing what the heck you're talking about another time.
Seriously now, WTF? Why is everyone acting like they've never had a BSOD on windows, a failed harddrive, a driver problem, or a vendor discontinue support? I use AWS, GAE and Google Apps and while there is a certain loss of control, the downtime I have experienced is far less than I would incur trying to roll my own infrastructure.
I've worked in a few companies with large IT budgets and have experienced more downtime in those environments than I have so far "in the cloud." I think the biggest problem with cloud computing, is when there is downtime, IT admins don't have anything else to do which frees up a lot of time for bitching about the downtime their blogs. Seems familiar from when I was an admin, except on the other side, it was my users bitching at me about an couple of hours of downtime a year.
Guess the lessons learned in the good ol' mainframe/dumb terminal days still apply, eh?: The network is fallible, and when the network croaks, you're royally forked.
MS servers don't crash! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/
Cloud apps have the same problem. When google apps or EC2 go does, it's news.
The amount of downtime each individual user experiences from their local Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office installations is far higher than the few hours per year people may experience with hosted apps.
In my company Google Apps is the most reliable thing we use. Microsoft products are my biggest headache. We have clients that need their work done and I don't have any more time to waste on these crappy machines. We will be switching to Apple for all mission-critical machines in the next three weeks.
If my MS computers could have only 3 hours of downtime a quarter I would be really happy. I used to work for an IT company and they primarily used MS servers for their clients. Big mistake. MS products are a nightmare. Their clients would have been happy with 3 hours of downtime instead of days and days down dealing with MS server issues. I would only avoid cloud computing if there were serious concerns with privacy or hacking.
Do you honestly believe that you or your employees are going to build a system with higher availability than Google?
Why, yes, I do. I've worked as an enterprise technical architect for 2 of the baby bells and a 3 hour outage is outrageous.
I've designed systems that will fail over within 2 minutes with with under 30 seconds of data loss. The users just need to re-login and the load balancers (also redundant) will redirect them to a different data center 600 miles away from their primary location.
This solution is possible regardless of the crap code provided. And when you build the entire network, you know where the weaknesses are - and you aren't at the whim of some ISP for connectivity. Redundancy, management, monitoring and good overall system designs are your friend. Cost and cocky software developers are your enemy. Having fully tested DR solution for the price of a Prod/Test set of systems is win/win, if you ask me. Most of the time, executive management agreed with me and we built systems with less than 30 minutes of downtime for disasters even on the cheapest projects. We test fail over every other week by swapping the primary location as a matter of course.
Google's weakness is in believing that having 1,000 of CPUs is all you need to deal with redundancy.
You have to plan for outages.
You have to practice your fail over plan - at least every other week or on game day, when it counts, YOU WILL FALTER.
"Hope is not a plan." -JG
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/crm/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=172900624
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9985201-7.html
If MS really gets on the band wagon, they will be in the same boat as the other providers. In fact it will be worse due to their lack of institutional competence and the fact that they will be charging $$$$$$ for the service. If one copy of Word crashes, no problem. If an entire large companies version of Word crashes then it won't be long before people start screaming bloody murder.
Low cost hosted apps make some sense for travelers or people who can't afford full office suites. In other cases, esp. when you factor in the lack of backups, it doesn't.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The thing that bothers me is that Google Apps might be fairly reliable, BUT:
1. Whenever thay have downtime, they don't want to come clean unless thay are forced to. This is not the kind of behavior that I want to see from my business partners. And they can yank the service completely without notice, which means that if any of our infrasructure lives on Apps, I get fired.
1a. When Apps fails, I'm not told why, and there is nothing that can be done to mitigate future failures. No XP is gained.
2. For servers, any individual member of a cluster can go down for a patch without affecting the integrity of the cluster, so the only downtime I can incur is due to infrastructure failures (hasn't happened yet) or admin stupidity (there have been a few instances of this, but nothing that broke more than a single server and merely degraded service). It's a tradeoff between a pretty good service that is "free", and an excellent service that costs money.
3. My confidential data lives on their network. Google has a terrible history with privacy issues. In the event of litigation and discovery (in my industry, the probability of such an event approaches unity), I simply would not trust Google to behave in a manner consistent with our best interests. If we lose control of sensitive data that we otherwise would not have due to Google receiving a subpoena and disclosing EVERYTHING (too much) in an effort to keep their hands clean, then I have a Problem. If I use Exchange, well then, we have highly paid and very good attorneys who have our best interests in mind to handle things.
Firstly, why the hell would you stick something important to you off site? We do our web development through an external agency, not only because people just aren't impressed with text editors anymore, but because it's not that mission critical to our business. Communication over e-mail is, and you would have better luck trying to remove our mail admin's comb-over than putting his servers in off-site care.
Secondly, anyone who thinks two to three hours of productivity downtime per quarter are that extreme should go visit the helpdesk in their company sometime. Microsoft Office installs that went bad, crappy hardware, a smart phone that won't cooperate, Windows Vista: these things disable my cow orker's productivity just as effectively, and in most OS or Office cases for two to three hours. I know, it's different when the whole company is on it's knees, which brings us back to my first issue with these cloud demands.
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
As someone who hasn't been able to access his home directory for the complete weekend due to some weird server hosting it at my company being down, I can confirm that relying on others sucks.
Remembering the last time I had a hard drive die without me having done backups for a long time, I can confirm that relying on myself sucks as well.
So I loose in all cases...
Hmmmm..... not long after introduction Google apps have 15 hours of unplanned downtime. We have apps that have been deemed critical and have had zero unplanned downtime since introduction (knock on wood). Our system was designed for absolute maximum 1 hour RTO and 1/2 hour RPO. Thus far, we haven't had to actually use DR plan in real life, but tests show we beat those numbers.
I'm sure Google "can" build better systems than I have, but like any other company they did a cost/benefit and decided what they have is good enough. For my company 15 hours down time isn't good enough for systems so we spent the money for a better system.
So.... yes you can at least do it better than Google "has" regardless of if they "can" do better or not. That isn't to say hosted apps aren't good enough in some cases, but to say you cannot provide better if needed is a bit silly.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
The sign-up page for Google Apps Premier says you get 99.9% uptime. That's about 1/3 of a day downtime per year, or a couple of hours per quarter.
Google seems to be managing to hit that 99.9% uptime, just not exceed it. VERY few in-house e-mail systems actually manage 99.9% uptime, especially when you consider scheduled maintenance and downtime (remember, Google's 99.9% is for all downtime)
In fact, I have seen very few Exchange systems that manage much more than 99% uptime. However, for those organizations, there are other compelling advantages to Exchange.
ERROR: Null
We use Google Apps for our email hosting. We use email all day long, especially because many of our automated processes during the day kick out emails with various status reports.
What happened last week is the first time since we began using it (1 year ago) that I have not been able to get into my google mail. I'd say that's not too bad.
And further, I've been using gmail since it was released 4 (?) years ago, and I can't recall a single other time I haven't been able to access it.
That's pretty darn good uptime.
I love being the asshole, but let's be honest here: how many in-house systems actually deliver better uptime than Google ?
Not that many. If they did, all us sysadmins would be out of a job. Apps are not perfect. The fact that you can pay Google a few pennies to manage your email, even with some downtime, makes it several orders of magnitude cheaper than an in-house solution for most people.
Give them a break, people can survive without email for a few hours.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I migrated my company of 80 users to Google Apps hosted email about a year ago, and yeah, sometimes there has been interimitent issues. People want to use it like Exchange via IMAP, but there are quirky issues, like Thunderbird sending the wrong delete command, Thunderbird somehow corrupting the user's password (the only way to correct is to login to the user's account on the hosted Gmail site), etc. So there definitely are some quirks sometimes.
That said, it's free. Somebody a few posts back posted the cost of an RHEL install with server costs etc. Using Exchange, the price increases even moreso (license costs, CALs, etc.). Ultimately, you're getting a hosted, web-based email solution with the capability for shared calendars and document collaboration, all for absolutely $0.00.
Free vs. $20k+ solution? In my oh-so-humble-opinion, users can deal with (and quite frankly, should continue to periodically expect) some downtime.
Google Gears is supposed to help with all of this, and doesn't Google make servers that you can install at your business?
just host them in your own datacenter, not at google. This makes administration and scaling pretty much effortless, I would think. I assume that google sells an appliance for exactly this? If not they are missing a huge opportunity.
I'm a professional writer and a recent convert to Google apps. I've been using Gmail since its inception for my business and personal email, and have recently been investigating using Google Docs. The word processor started off as little more than a text editor but nowadays is pretty balanced in terms of features.
The main benefit is that it's all cross-platform, and I haven't got to worry about where my docs are stored (no messing about with a USB key stick, for example). I can access my work from any computer, running virtually any OS (provided Firefox is installed), virtually anywhere in the world.
I really do think this is one possible future route for productivity applications on a computer. When viewed in this light, online apps are very compelling.
The only issue is, as mentioned, outages. Every now and again (maybe twice a year), Gmail is inaccessible. If Google Docs is inaccessible, I'm stuffed and can't work. This is why I use Google Gears to hold local copies of docs, but this is still in beta testing. But a local backup is, of course, always a good idea.
Our mail platform has beaten google in uptime and security "bugs" for the past 40 months. Why? I attribute it to using proven technologies and not everyone wanting an account being able to get one: we charge every system user. You would be surprised how much this cuts down on spammers/excessive usage.
Google has had their mail in beta for years. The last time I checked SMTP was ratified as an RFC over a decade ago.
Website Hosting
It's free or nearly free. What do companies expect they're getting for free?
With those you know WHEN it's going to happen. You can schedule it for out of hours.
The position you're touting is completely foreign to me. I don't want to discount it, I just think it must be because you work for a small company and don't have any experience administering widely used web sites.
Even for medium sized companies, I have to imagine that "out of hours" are few and far between.
I'm a big tall mofo.
is in-site and outsource. failed in house tech tends to put alot of pressure on the in house support staff hired to maintain the tech, but im thinking most management is wondering if they could withstand the black eye of losing something like this if they hosted it at google
this would be much less of a concern if they open sourced the entire group of apps, and offered hosting as an option. IT Managers could evaluate it on a more level cost benefit ground.
i guess another question, is this really something that should be web based?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Unlike in search, hosted services for businesses is an area where Google is going to be playing catch-up with Microsoft for a long time. Google is attractive to individuals and some small businesses and a very small number of bleeding edge companies but most will choose to either stick with their on-premises software or will look to vendors like MSFT and IBM who have more enterprise experience. Microsoft is offering a "beta" of hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications (IM, presence) and LiveMeeting now (http://www.mosbeta.com/Welcome.aspx) and already has some big companies using it including Coca-cola. Google's offering is actually pretty compelling in some ways. It's cheap to get into ($50/user/year although that doesn't include a lot of things that most companies would want such as directory integration, support for smartphones etc.). Google Apps are simple and easy to use. While they don't have a lot of features that many companies will want, for task workers with limited needs they made work. But their biggest gap - which they probably have no intention to fill - is that they ONLY offer hosted services. Microsoft can offer companies a choice of hosted, on-premises or a mix. Want users at HQ to use on-premises mail (Exchange)? No problem. Want remote workers to use a hosted version? No problem. Want integration with your on-premises Active Directory? No problem. Want to give users a choice of browser-based interface or Outlook for mail? No problem. This flexibility is something that will ultimately win over a lot of customers who consider Google.
Based on my own personal experiences with dealing with google, I would never trust anything besides their search engine... If you have ever tried to make contact with google staff about a real issue, you'll soon notice there is no customer service, no help desk, you will be greeted by an arrogant 16-year-old who tells you to goto the google.com site to resolve whatever issue you're calling about. Also, if you've ever tried using Google Checkout (what a joke), they put arbitrary holds on the money and attempts to resolve issues (again, no customer service here) take weeks and months. Google has a great search engine, but thats about it. Don't put your eggs in one basket by using anything that they put out. They're good at writing crawlers and indexers, not good at much else.
IANASA = ?
I am NASA?
I am not a System Administrator?
I am not a Secret Agent?
I am not a Secret Acronym?
> So one ad-laden website has a definition? Wow, yeah, you *must* be right.
All the dictionaries I've checked contain both definitions.
Suck it up - he *is* right, and you are wrong. Just admit it and move on.
The part that is being misunderstood is simply this. Instead of just complaining about Google Apps... compare it to the alternatives.
How many companies rely on Microsoft Outlook with Microsoft Exchange Server? When you offer an application or suite to the whole nation or WORLD, and campaign for its use - then YES, you do need to keep a very near-0 downtime to be really successful.
Except, Microsoft Exchange (while often reliable) does have its moments. Sometimes, just from getting clogged by tons of spam, it can come to a crawl. The server can become unavailable to do network issues. Microsoft Outlook has a tendency to run slowly on some machines, or crash regularly. Expecting ANYTHING that uses computers to work 100% perfectly all of the time, although desirable, is completely unrealistic.
I don't think the people here are saying "expect downtime and just deal with it." What is really being said is, "when MS Exchange goes down... or there are internal network hiccups... or when Outlook locks up on your machine... complain loudly on the Internet instead of to your local admin... that way, the world can get a real comparison between Google Apps and the alternative."
The only reason Google Apps seems like the "bad one" here is because people go posting on blogs and news sites about it. Why? Because it's news... it's rare... it's not what people expect of Google. When Exchange server craps out, Outlook locks up, your computer gets a blue-screen-of-death, a hard drive goes bad, a router needs restarting, power goes out to the building, a UPS battery goes bad, etc, etc, etc... nobody bothers posting this on blogs or news sites because, well, it's an every-day occurrence... it's not exactly news.
Then, when you compare systems that are "always up and available 24/7, can be easily accessed from outside of the company without a complicated VPN, have admins that don't gripe if they are taking up dozens of gigs of storage, with the capability of searching through millions of emails in a fraction of a second" to Google Apps... you'll likely notice that these other systems (with you take into account the cost of the servers, routers, admin hours, electricity, software, etc) cost much much more than $50/year per user.
What's happening here is people are comparing Apples to Orangutans and are creating unrealistic expectations. If these companies really have that much cash to just waste on something they have been brainwashed into thinking is perfect, then they're next likely step in these economic times is to lay off some of their admins because, after all, why do you need admins if the systems are perfect?
I don't know about anyone else, but the fact that downtime is such a shock on Google is testament to how great the service usually is. Most companies I've worked for don't have an up time record that could even come close to Google.
www.ianhoar.com My blog about geeking out.
LOL, enterprise class funny.
... but rather a big win for locally installed and controlled "personal software", as well as - HOPEFULLY - another loss for the evil forces of greed trying to indoctrinate users to the concept of a software subscription model.
Selling software as a subscription is the REAL reason why companies like Microsoft, Google, and so many others are experimenting with Web apps. It's their latest attempt to re-brand software as "content" and convince people to pay for it every month, just like they do cable TV. If they succeed, software publishers will be making far more profit than they do now, and their accountants will be boastful about how regular and predictable the cashflow is.
Just say no to Web apps and every other attempt to sell software as subscriptions.
Linux has been rock-solid from version 1. Version 3 isn't being planned yet.
The main complaint against Linux is that it requires someone who "knows what he is doing". If the same is required of Microsoft solutions, then why not just use Linux?
I'm quite happy with Google Apps and all the uncertainty that comes with beta applications. I give credit to Google for keeping as much uptime as they do for such a robust, free suite. Sure, I've seen a few outages with Google. But I never lost any mail as with MobileMe. I actually dropped my MobileMe account in favor of Google Apps. Uptime was one reason, and so wasn't the fact that MobileMe mail isn't searchable beyond subject line. Occasionally losing connectivity is one thing. Paying $99/year for for that sort of service is quite unreasonable.
Hosted apps are convenient, but if people are getting paid on performance (commission etc), downtime costs EVERYONE money.
I think a lot of what google sells is b.s. - 3 years ago, it worked, I don't think google will enjoy as much success online in the coming 3 years. They see this - it's why they are getting into the mobile space. They have to.
With this mobile space, they may release an ad sponsored app server because that's further growth for them.
Oil has gone up, do you think Internet based services will go up? Nope, they'll come down - people expect them to, or won't pay for them because there is so much free shit on the Internet nowadays with geek trying to beat geek.
Foundation supports foundation - so pick your foundations carefully.
I JUST switched our small business's email from a real second rate email host to Google apps. The outages affected a small subset of emails, which in our case happened to be a mission critical email address for almost 2 full days.
I'll say this, our boss was NOT happy, and I was taking my vacation at the time. I left them all the information necessary incase something should happen. Even the google premier phone-line wasn't able to help them out. (Downtime is downtime). I tried to advocate to stick with them, although my boss isn't having it, and now I'm stuck switching email providers again.
Google's loss, not mine.
> Is it really good or are you some kind of M$ munchkin that
> has to smear hardworking administrators to make up for the
> M$'s horrible reputation.
Wow, who modded this up 'interesting' so it shows up in the page view...?
I swear Slashdot is really going to the dogs lately.
Until this is resolved properly, there is no way I will use an e-mail system that wants to keep my e-mail on its servers (Gmail tries hard to discourage us from deleting our e-mail, even after downloading). This situation has been an open sore for years, and not just for Gmail. It seems that the best that can be done is to limit the time on in-transit servers to the bare minimum. For me, that's a hard prerequisite before any service level guarantee by an online provider. The law (or its interpretation) has to change first.
Twit, my friend, I don't think you understand what it is that they are doing wrong.
Good point that applies for any OS.
I'm starting to realise why most people around here think you are a retard, and I'm not even trying to get involved in /. drama.
Get a job. You'll have less time for trolling, and the amount of software you can afford will increase.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Are you $uggesting that Google runs off a single commodity box?
Oh they use a cluster of thousands of machines, and its more reliable than a single server. Funny that, but hey, lets ba$h m$!!!
lol$
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I use Windows without an AV, and don't get any malware. If you've used Windows and got infected, you were doing something wrong. If you haven't, you're trolling.
But we only need to look at your user name to answer that question.
Get a grip. 99.999% (there's your five nines) of email is just not that critical.
It's amazing how many people will insist their email server is a mission critical system, and yet it goes down for a day or so and poof.... They *don't* go out of business! Fancy that.
Pick up a telephone or (heaven forbid) talk to someone in your office face to face. There's a really good chance you'll actually get more stuff done that day.
(Yes, I know Google Apps is more than email, but what I said about email probably applies to manyof them as well).
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
So what? The idiots got what they deserved. Anybody who thinks this is a good idea is a complete moron. "Gee, store all of my data at a remote location where any of a half-dozen places having an outage can keep me from my business? Where do I sign?"
Oh, the guy in the article beta-tested for nine months. Surely, if is doesn't go down in nine months, it'll be up forever without a hitch!
Very valid counter-argument, except I think a company trying to implement something like your example of MS Exchange, in a near 0 downtime secnario, would take into account that the product itself is going to potentially go down once in a while. Like you say, it isn't really "news" that Microsoft Windows-based server apps aren't 100% rock solid reliable.
I would assume a "proper" implementation would involve numerous servers running cloned copies of the environment, with the ability to do hot-failover in the event of any component, hardware or software, failing.
Truthfully, I've never worked for an employer who was really interested in achieving "near 0" downtime, seriously enough to spend the money on it that it required. But I believe most people opting for that would be looking more at "big iron" minicomputers or mainframes from the likes of IBM ... not Intel x86 based servers running on microcomputer architectures.
Go, Go, Gadget Total Reading Comprehension Failure!
The outages, which affected both Gmail and Apps, 'could serve as a deterrent to some IT and business managers who might not be ready to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their servers,' according to the article.
Split the difference: run it locally, but over your LAN instead of the WAN, and call it "fog computing". The fog system occasionally syncs with the cloud system as available.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?