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Extended Gmail Outage Frustrates Admins
CWmike writes "A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored. At about 5 p.m. US Eastern on Wednesday, Google announced that the company was aware of the problem preventing Gmail users from logging into their accounts and that it expected to fix it by 9 p.m. on Thursday. Google offered no explanation of the problem or why it would take it so long to solve the problem, a '502' error when trying to access Gmail. Google said the bug is affecting 'a small number of users,' but that is little comfort for Google Apps administrators. Admin Bill W. posted a desperate message on the forum Thursday morning, saying his company's CEO is steaming about being locked out of his e-mail account since around 4 p.m. on Wednesday. It's not the first Gmail outage. So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers? And a more immediate question: Why no Gears for offline Gmail access at very least, Google?"
Not to mention it is a "free" service, no one has a right to demand it to be up anyway. You are storing your e-mail on google's servers and you pay nothing for it. If they need access to their crucial time-sensitive data then they should keep it themselves or pay for a service which will guarantee availability.
Some of these companies are paying customers. The headline only mentions Gmail, but this is also about Google Apps as a whole.
Doesn't anyone RTFA?
$50/yr for each user is not "free". Nor is it in the domain of "you get what you pay for". $50 per user is actually a rather significant sum when we're talking about 100+ user companies.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Quote from article: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers?
Paying customers of the apps Premium account level DO have a service level agreement.
Free customers do not however which is probably what they were trying to say.
Revised quote: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for free customers in addition to paying customers?
From the terms of service for Premier account edition:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html
1.9. *Service Level Agreement*, or *SLA* means the Service Level Agreement located at the following URL: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/sla.html
Downtime period is a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime
Service Credit is
three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9
seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0
fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.
You must request your service credit. It is not automatic.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html
There you go, the SLA for Google Apps. It's listed at 99.9%
But... the remedies for them failing that suck, only up to 15 days worth of service per month will be credited.
Also, it costs $50 per user per year
That's just it, google DOES charge for the hosted apps version of Gmail. See http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html for more info.
Does it include a reverse bayesian filter to generate stock market and h3rb@l \/i4gr@ spam?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Um. I can't find where they made this excuse...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Google Apps for Business
Claims right on that page that it provides 99.9% uptime.
So if you were in control of your destiny then your email servers may still be down however you are the one the needs to fix the problem...
Also there is a case of being smart with you SaaS models, You can often get it so you can get your own data back when you request it. If GMail no longer fits their business model. Well move the data to an other SaaS. Email is kinda easy to move around.
You sound like a guy who is afraid to Fly. Even though you may be statically better off flying then driving however if you don't have the control in your hands you are more nervous.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If Google doubts it's readiness for mission-critical usage it gets a "beta" slapped on it. Do real professionals actually think Google Apps is ready for prime time usage?
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/33131
Google Apps is a hosted service sold to businesses, Google are meant to provide that redundancy, and in theory they should be in a much better position to provide it than most small to medium size companies' IT departments.
In practice they seem to be sucking a bit.
Yes. In your organization how many times have your servers went down or had a problem... Compare that to Google Mail... You will probably find that there is a lot less downtime.
Sorry, but the total downtime I've ever caused ALL of my employers over my career has been a LOT less than 28 hours! Heck, even if you add up the downtime for all of the single systems I've admined their collective downtime is probably only close to that. I'm not bragging, I'm pointing out how bad of an outage this is. The only other outages I've personally heard of that were this bad are hosting providers who have critical systems physically damaged and a failed Exchange 2000 pilot at Cisco (They had a corrupted datastore that was so bad that MS and HP and EMC couldn't recover it so they had to fall back to a tape restore which took something similar to this gmail outage)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yet amazingly enough planes crash. They crash quite often in fact. In fact from what I remember the chance to die per hour of travel is roughly the same between airplanes and cars. In other words the chance of dying from some random outside event is probably much higher in an airplane per hour of travel. So yes, a safe driver is much less likely to die in a car than in an airplane.
How do you figure it's not that hard to run your own mailserver? Please tell me how to achieve the following, simply.
1. POP and IMAP access for all users
2. Simple ability to delegate administrative rights for the domain including creation of new user rights
3. Ability for users to manage aliases
4. Ability for users to manage mail lists
5. Spam prevention with similar success rates (including very low false positives) to Gmail or any other mass mail site
6. Webmail
7. Simple password changing for users
8. Authenticated SMTP
9. Simple SPF
I've spent a lot of time and effort, and have a good smtp / imap / pop / webmail solution, but it's still cobbled together from loads of stuff and it's still missing solutions to allow users to change passwords and delegate administration control of a domain.
DO you have real-time backups? Hard drives do fail. They have moving parts you know. Most of your solid uptime is luck. Part of it is planning. Still mostly luck.
It should take google nill time to get back up after a data centre burns down because they have more than one. The failure point of your system is the fact that it is centralised - but being on a university you have little choice over that - and little reason to distribute your datacenters geographically - so you don't have failover.
yeah glite is on life-support in an official capacity, but there is work being done here. Though it's mostly just enough to keep it functional with the changes that google impliment.
It works well enough that I can run it from my own server and access my email in places where gmail might be blocked or otherwise difficult to access directly. which is all I need it for.
Collector's Edition
If Google's datacenter burns to the ground, how long do you think you'll be without your GMail account?
But that's one of the strengths of using gmail.
The loss of a complete datacenter for them would be a minor issue which would cause slow access. Accidental removal of one part of their infrastructure doesn't cause much of a problem. It's the administrative issues that get replicated across the network that cause major issues.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Well, the Exchange server where I work reboots on a nearly weekly basis for the seemingly continual Microsoft patches. That has got to be bad for uptime stats.
You work as the administrator. Your job is probably administering the system... Take You salary and add say 30% for your benefits. 35k - 90k depnding on your location vs. Say you use a professional SaaS shop and pay say $2000 (not just google free service) a month for the same services, that is 24k a year. With the $2000 a year service you are probably a good customer thus they make sure they are up. If not they will work just as hard as you to keep it running. This shop may have 10 - 20 people working on those servers if there is a problem they will go and fix it.
Dont confuse the Free Gmail as a true SaaS.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What part of my post didn't explain how even with close to 0 downtime you STILL might have data loss?
Sure it's and excuse - and a valid one...
Everyone knows gmail is in beta - that leaves a huge loophole for issues like this in Google's favor.. If you're in a car running on beta tires, and you have some understanding of what that means (as such, the admins that have outsourced their email do by nature of their position) - if your car gets a flat due to one of those beta tires going boom, are you going to whine to the tire company that you missed a meeting because of it? Only if you want to look like more of an ass than you already do for using a beta product in a production environment.. People who know what all things "beta" entails use gmail, but they also have backups just in case..
No no no. We are talking about two completely different things here. My point was that with Google EVEN WITH downtime there is no loss of data. I then pointed out that RAID controllers and the hard drives attached to them sometimes fail in such a way that nothing is recoverable. Then I pointed out that you don't have real-time backups. Yes, the email gets delivered but nobody can get to their old mail until you do a restore in which case they probably lost some email between when the backup was done and when the server failed. Then you mentioned that you can throw extra servers at it at which point I mentioned that this really is cost prohibitive when you compare it to Google's solution.
If you want to argue features or speed or something like that then I will listen, but arguing against Google Apps because of reliability is lame and you don't have much going for that argument.