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

Incredible Expectations

[bigtallmofo]

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?

Re:why "big win" for microsoft ?

[lukas84]

Google Apps Premier is not free - it's 50$ per year per account.

I'm using it for my private mail. I like it. But i don't expect 100% uptime - especially for just 50Ã per year per account.

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".

Re:why "big win" for microsoft ?

[jabithew]

Because it's a refutation of Google's business model (cloud based, for want of a better way of phrasing it) compared to Microsoft's (locally based tech).

I remain sceptical, as it it would seem that Google would have to be less reliable than local kit in order to make it worth switching back, even before you take into account extra costs for doing it locally. (How much more do you want to spend to get an extra hour per quarter in reliability?)

Nevertheless, IANASA so I don't know the data behind this decision.

Where are the stories about the outage itself?

[yuna49]

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.

Re:why "big win" for microsoft ?

[johannesg]

There are only two IT solutions out there in the minds of too many people: Microsoft, and non-Microsoft.

To go with Microsoft is the easy, sure road. It is the standard. It is what is expected, what is known to be safe, what will always work. Any problems you encounter here are met with "well, computers always have problems don't they?"

To go with non-Microsoft is hard and uncertain. It is not expected, nor "the standard", and suspected to be extremely unsafe. The smallest problem will be countered with "you and your stupid ideas. Now go and call LocalRetailerInc for a certified Microsoft solution, and be glad I don't fire your ass over this fiasco!"

Google is not Microsoft, so according to the business logic described above, if it doesn't work the only possible alternative is to use Microsoft.

power

[epfreed]

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.

Re:why "big win" for microsoft ?

[Instine]

Precisely. And while I use Gmail most of the time, and the rest of my office use an Exchange server hosted in same said office, guess who has the better uptime...?

That would be me. They frequently (3-4 time a month) loose half a day, as the under resourced, high maintanence, auto-destructing, sorry updated, blackhat honey pot splutters in the corner. I've lost two half days in the however many years I've used Gmail.