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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.

5 of 155 comments (clear)

  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.

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  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?

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    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.

  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: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.