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Google Apps Gets a 99.9% Guarantee
David Gerard passes along a posting on Google's official blog announcing that they have extended the three-nines SLA for the Premier Edition of Google Apps from Gmail alone to also cover the Calendar, Docs, Sites, and Google Talk services. 99.9% uptime translates to 45 minutes a month of downtime, and the blog post puts this in context with Gmail's historical reliability, which has been between three and four times as good over the last year (10-15 min./mo.). It also claims, based on research by an outside group, that Gmail's historical reliability beats that of in-house hosted solutions such as Groupwise and Exchange, on average. Reader Ian Lamont adds an article in The Standard that digs down into the details of the SLA, revealing for instance that outages of less than 10 minutes aren't counted against the monthly 45 minutes.
so if I have 60 1 minute downtimes, I'm keeping within the 99.9% uptime range? I call shenanigans.
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
Google doesn't have 100% uptime? They have never gone down when I've noticed, guess its that sweet cloud setup they have there.
looks like your frosty piss froze before it could reach the front.
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
Yes, but what is the average company's internet downtime verses their LAN downtime for a single-campus outfit?
So instead of LAN / Exchange Server (or whatever is being used) you now have LAN / WAN / Google downtime. WAN gateway downtime is probably the weakest link in the chain, so wouldn't the total downtime be greater using something internet based?
Better known as 318230.
The 99.9% guarantee is great, if there's someone to talk to who'll actually look at the problem when those three 9s aren't met. Otherwise it's marketing propaganda.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The issue is your internet connection AND your ISPs connection to the world. Your connection to the world is more likely to go down before a Google cluster would. Think of how often Telco's, ISP, and major hubs go down. This is the point behind having LOCAL copies of apps/servers/services, the odds that the hub/switch dies (with nothing else inhouse to patch around) is very slim compared to the odds of internet connectivity going south.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
is an internet service that's 99.9% reliable, or this is all moot
..if you don't count individual .02% outages? IANAS[tatistician] but I'm pretty sure it invalidates their findings for anyone who really cares.
It seems correct that Google's end of the network works very well.
The other side of the network, yours, is the other consideration; how good your connection? LAN? desktops? Etc., Etc...
Then beyond that, i've used Gmail since 2004 from Korea to Paris and NYC to Cali... I've had it run fast and slow.. is that the Google Server? the network? my computer(s)? I would think it's mostly network congestion but that's a hard one for an average user to determine (where and why and how to fix).
http://www.hawknest.com/
If your organization will fail without 100% email uptime - bon chance in the real world, mon friend, bon chance.
Make sure your users have a phone directory available on their local PCs (or paper copies on their cubicle walls). Have a phone tree notification system scheme in place in case the network is REALLY down.
And prepare for the troublesome PRODUCTIVITY SURGE when your users cannot reach the Internet!
Just another proof that when one deals with "programming" companies, you don't get what you pay for, you get what you negotiate for, and then less.
My telephone service [POTS] gets me 99.999% reliability, but then again, it's run by engineers, and not simple programmers.
Want to charge me engineering rates for your "software engineers", give me engineering guarantees, and none of this software bull.
If their service is so solid, then why not remove the 'BETA' tag from Gmail?
was their claim that this is 4x less outages than on-site-maintained Exchange or GroupWise.
(Notes, of course, gets 45 minutes of uptime a year.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
fuck that, imagine how many disputes they will have with retarded IT departments who can't manage their own network properly causing goolge apps to be unavailable. they are going to get the blame for every isp fuck up that happens as well.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Faster Googlefanboys, Kill! Kill!
I achieved four nines (%99.99) 8 years ago with Netscape's broken mail server "Suite Spot" running on a (at the time) three year old Sun E450 with 4 gigs of RAM. As I recall, it served about 120,000 clients on a large cable network in Chicago.
This whole "new web" thing is very pretty, but it seems like about three steps back to me.
Gmail might have a better uptime than Exchange, but at least Exchange has push-email.
How much data loss occurs? big corp email loss is bigtime (I worked at one of the biggest, "most knowledgable", and exchange server crashes were frequent. You just had to have email set to move to a local folder. Of course, the local machine was also running M$windoze, so you lost it there.
Network connectivity issues were rare (think "invented the internet").
Lost, corrupted, unavailable, and stolen data must be the primary determinants of usability. So unavailable comes in third. Think backup tapes, and you will see that although not easily available, buttsave is possible has long been good enough.
So the questions are, in order:
How much mission critical data is lost? one major contract or project is too much.
Corrupted data is probably useless, nearly lost.
Can google data be restored? I have not heard.
Can google apps be hacked?
wake up and hold your nose
So if somebody is running their business on the free version of Google Apps and they have more downtime than the SLA allowed exactly what do they get? A refund? And by the way, I'd like a list of those Exchange customers who are suffering 2.5 HOURS of downtime per month. Sounds like they should be about ready to change service providers...
-B-
I dunno, if my servers had 45 minutes of unplanned downtime per month, I think the condition would be called 'chronic repeated failures' and be subject to some 'employee counseling.' I can understand planned, scheduled downtime after hours, but I don't think that's what they are saying here. Our users get nasty when the net is not available for 20 seconds. 45 minutes a month isn't acceptable around here. And saying, "Hey, this isn't a hospital. It's not as if anyone was at risk!" is not something you'd want to say either. Nope, I think they need to add some more nine's there. Not something to earn you bragging rights or put on your resume.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
0.00099999.
Hey, it's five nines ... and with all the "exceptions" and bogus metrics in google's SLA, they're not offering 3 nines.
Wading through Coward's latest dense prose, I felt disappointed. What could have been a truely epic troll was falling flat. I suspect that by padding out the homosexual references somewhat, and by pacing himself, Coward could have really delived with this one. There was some unique content here but terrible delivery.
A poor performance. One and a half stars.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Imagine an airline that offered 99.9% reliability. Or a new car that runs only 99.9% of the time. 45 minutes per month of downtime sounds reasonable, until that 45 minutes happens to take our entire organization's email system offline for a few adrenaline-filled minutes on a busy Monday morning. Cloud computing is still in its infancy, and will be until the "cloud" offers near-perfect redundancy on both a software and network level.
When Google is down, all you get is access to lousy forums with little or no support, while your end users keep asking for an ETA or at least for an explanation. You end up being a punching bag for the failure of a solution you probably never agreed with and that was forced down your throat by the management.
I guess this is an ok deal for small biz with no technical employees, but as soon as your users headcount goes over 20, Novell Groupwise or Microsoft Small Business Server becomes more interesting. And when hosted locally, it will at least work as internal groupware and allow users to access shared documents while the internet connection is down.
lucm, indeed.
Google guarantees 99.9% uptime, right? So what do you get if they don't deliver? A lollipop? A cookie? A profound apology personally signed by Larry and Sergey?
Actually you get extra time.
If the system is down for betwwen 45 minutes and 7.2 hours, you get an extra three days. &.2 hours is pretty much a full business day if it starts at the wrong time.
If the system is down for 7.2 hours to 36 hours you get 7 free days.
And if the system is down for more than 36 hours you get 15 free days.
I don't know about the rest of you, but most of my clients would be losing at least tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour if all of their key systems went bust. Email is down? No communications because not only is that a communication channel, that's also where you keep most of your contact information. Productivity suites are down? There goes work for the entire office for the duration. Not only are they unable to create new documents, they're unable to access existing information.
You can say what you want about Microsoft Office (or even move to something else like OpenOffice or StarOffice) but at least when something happens to Office, it only stops one user. If Google goes down, your entire enterprise grinds to a halt for the duration.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
Upgrades are planned to have no impact on availability. Check the article; they have no 'unplanned' outages. I don't think Google have ever suffered a user-visible data loss; when they talk about downtime, it means user connections can't get to the backends for some reason. If your network connection dies, Google Docs retries till you get back in coverage. Hopefully that'll happen sometime.
If you plan to take out a service with an upgrade, you are doing it wrong. Seriously.
Good for writers. Has autosave. Excellent uptime. And google GDRIVE for internet file storage.
Others who have file storage.
http://xdrive.com/
http://mozy.com/#
it might be true that Google apps have better uptime than any internal application. My big fear is that anything in the cloud is physically exposed to the "the world" including some 1000 bad guys. Any Software has bugs so its just a matter of time that these bad guys will steal/erase/modify my data in the cloud. It has happened so often and will never stop. Granted, Exchange also has bugs (of course) - but at least these are only exposed to the people in my company - a few 1000 rather than zillions. So no matter ho trusted and reliable a cloud provider might be - I wont trust my data to the cloud.
i had a 2 day outage which just said 'sorry an error has occurred' there is no way i could be without professional mail or documents for 2 days. I would only consider this for social non-critical uses.
so if they go down for a couple of days and its only a small percentage effected - what happens? Nothing = they aren't going to pay you compensation. You'll get a 'sorry blah blah' and that will be it. Not much use of a guarantee that.
never trust 100% online applications. You need local copies of your email and documents so you have options.
Yeah! 99.9% uptime guys! I don't see anything wrong with using Google for all company email and data.
Not only are we letting them store it for as long as they want, even if you "delete" it, but in the numerous instances where they are down, or more likely, your connection is down, then the only person able to use any of the data is Google!
If you're going to be pedantic ... Google is not a company. Google is the name of a company.
Yes I'm sure someone can one up my pedantry, something about visual representations of sound tokens representing names, or somesuch ...
Nope. Google is a company. "Google" is the name of a company. The use-mention distinction strikes again!
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
For me it happens that my 0.1% share of service outtage maps directly to the functionality of sending e-mails?
I get an "invalid from address" whenever I try to send a message through gmail's interface. The "support" for this is almost impossible to find out, and there has been no feedback from my complaint there. And yes, I've tried several settings that could affect the "from" address already (and it worked up to 2 weeks ago)
-><- no
Google apps is NOT enterprise ready. It's taken us a month, an outside consultant, and a week's worth or intermittent, screwed up email to even get close to what we had before, email-wise. We haven't had any time to work on calendars, etc. It was extremely difficult getting google's attention at all, much less a path to anyone who could actually help. This has been the most painful rollout I've worked on in years.
"It all depends on what your definition of 'evil' is."
YMMV. I would only recommend google apps to a competitor I wanted to hurt. 8^)