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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.

13 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Umm... by Sylos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Umm... by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Most likely it's the time for node crash detection and load balancing to take effect.

      If service is that bad or intermittent, nobody would buy service there.

      --
  2. What about internet downtime? by Dan+East · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:What about internet downtime? by vadim_t · · Score: 4, Insightful

      With an internal server, the mail you got it stays there so you can still read it, and compose replies. With an internal SMTP you can queue emails for delivery even if they don't get out (nice for laptops that may not stay around until the connection comes back). With an internal IM server you keep being able to talk to people inside the company, and can depending on the server, can queue messages until the connection comes back.

      Now if you happen to use say, gmail, then you're out of luck. You can't read your mail, can't compose replies, can't IM people in the next room. All you can do is sit there and wait for somebody to fix the problem.

    2. Re:What about internet downtime? by mysidia · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

      E-mail is internet based and isn't going to work if your WAN is down, regardless (you can't e-mail anyone, or receive e-mail from other people).

      One of the costs of using a service like Google Apps is the increased need to design a proper resilient network at your site that won't go down.

      If you are multi-homed and have dual WAN links that take an independent path, with a standby router, and ensure your ISP provides redundancy, and your network is properly designed according to network industry standard and respected network equipment manufacturer's best practices: then a failure of your internet connection is unlikely.

      Much less likely than the probability of failure of a single mail server.

      The cost of internet link failure or congestion is significant for companies that rely on internet-based resources and online communications for productivity.

      For companies that conduct eCommerce, it is unthinkable to have the website going down, or to not have planned enough capacity for the network connection to meet all anticipated needs in a failure scenario. Bad connectivity is already costly, even without relying on application service providers for business apps.

      In a well-designed setup, the WAN itself should not much reduce that 99.999% figure. Although yes, there are some new failure modes introduced.

      Loss of connectivity to Google, for example, even if the network is otherwise working. Some unexpected Tier1 depeering ala. Sprint/Cogent may cause issues on rare occasion.

  3. Re:Wait.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Google is a company. Saying "Google doesn't have 100% uptime" makes as much sense as saying "Microsoft takes 40 minutes to install". What specifically are you trying to say?

  4. Re:Server uptime is not the issue. by Predius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Gee... you don't think I haven't brought it up, multiple times, with data? I pointed out the pitfalls before we jumped in, and we got bit. If I had control we'd be off GMail, but it's not my final decision.

    That doesn't make my observation any less salient.

  5. Nothing has 100% uptime by EsJay · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

  6. Still beta? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    If their service is so solid, then why not remove the 'BETA' tag from Gmail?

  7. Re:Wait.. by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    On a related subject, next person who says "in the cloud" is going to get cockpunched. As parent said, there are no clouds, just highly available clusters.

  8. Re:Wait.. by glwtta · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I thought it was a really annoying buzzword for compute capacity as a service?

    --
    sic transit gloria mundi
  9. Re:Wow, that's pretty terrible by hax0r_this · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That may be true, but what you were able to achieve and what you guarantee clients you will achieve are two very different things.

  10. 99.9% uptime of a pain in the butt? by Roadkills-R-Us · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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^)