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."

Comments

why "big win" for microsoft ?

[unity100]

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.

Re:why "big win" for microsoft ?

[blincoln]

No matter how good the admin is, running it on an old gaming machine provided by the CEOs Son won't give you five nines. You can be happy to get 80%.

How is that the fault of Exchange?

I've backed up our main Exchange engineer for over five years now in an enterprise environment, and out of our 10+ servers I've seen 2 outages. One was due to the system board on the server failing, so that leaves one where Exchange was at fault (one of the databases became corrupt and had to be restored from a backup).

I attribute this to three main factors:

- We run it on enterprise-class hardware.
- Despite rumours to the contrary, most of Microsoft's enterprise-level software is pretty solid, unless it's a 1.0 or 2.0 release.
- Our Exchange implementation was engineered by someone who knew what he was doing, and is now supported by someone who knows what he's doing.

Anyway, this article just makes me more convinced that we've done the right thing by sticking with our own system instead of using a hosted product.

Google's Service Level Agreement

[Animats]

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".

I did not even notice it...

[mrboyd]

We use google Apps for email and to be really honest no one here noticed the issue and I trust the email that could not reach gmail server during the outage will be retransmitted in time. The reliability of our mail server was far worse when we hosted it ourselves, particularly when some of the SEA-ME-WE cables got cut and our provider lost all connectivity for a couple of days. I am certain that if I had big money to waste I could build my own email servers farms and target the five nines but right now we are paying $0 and we are getting a pretty decent service.
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)

• Decent server (RAID, Redudant PS): $3,500x5= $17,500
• Operating system license: RHEL Standard subscription: $799 (optional of course)
• Software license: $0 (sendmail etc..)

Monthly Recurring Cost

• Hosting with decent SLA: $500x2= $1,000
• Email Administrator (IT Admin): $10,000(?)
• Replacement Parts: $100(?)

Implementation time

• 2 to 6 months (including, research, documentation)

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.

Re:Where are the stories about the outage itself?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a GMail outage on Monday, which was reported in their blog:

[blog entry]

I've read rumors about other Google Apps outages later last week, but nothing official and saw no evidence of them myself.

The uptime percentage is very clear...

[slk]

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.