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Google Apps Gets a 99.9% Guarantee

Posted by kdawson on from the outlook-cloudy-try-again dept.

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.

6 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wait.. by mikael_j · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's called a cluster, "The cloud" is a really annoying buzzword for software as a service.

    /Mikael

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    Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
  2. Server uptime is not the issue. by B5_geek · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
    1. Re:Server uptime is not the issue. by Predius · · Score: 5, Informative

      As a commercial user of Google Apps, I have observed this not being the case. GMail does go down, and the cause is not our connectivity. What's worse is when there is a problem, all the 'phone support' does is tell you to post on their forums... not impressed.

  3. Wow, that's pretty terrible by yttrstein · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Wait.. by game+kid · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a King Arthur cloud, maaan. Get with the times!

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  5. Re:Wait.. by moosesocks · · Score: 4, Informative

    There'd be no need for a Beowulf-type cluster in this case.

    Have a bunch of machines running identical instances of Apache, and randomly fire requests at them individually. This balances the load, and ensures that the servers themselves aren't a single point of failure.

    It's quite a bit more complicated than this in reality, although you should get the basic idea.

    Beowulf is typically used for clusters that seek to emulate a supercomputer (usually for scientific number-crunching), rather than a server. For this reason, something like Google's setup would more typically be referred to as a "server farm"

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