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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
It's called a cluster, "The cloud" is a really annoying buzzword for software as a service.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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.
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?
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)
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!
A Beowulf cluster?
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
The service they sell isn't beta. The service they give away is what they inflict new features on.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
It's a King Arthur cloud, maaan. Get with the times!
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
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.
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"
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Yeah, punch those bastards. Punch 'em so hard they'll go flying up high in the sky. In the cloud, even.
Google doesn't have 100% uptime? They have never gone down when I've noticed, guess its that sweet cloud setup they have there.
Seriously? I see it happen at least once every few weeks or so. It's usually very temporary, like as in less than a minute, but I'm quite familiar with the look of Google's error/service unavailable page...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I thought it was a really annoying buzzword for compute capacity as a service?
sic transit gloria mundi
It's called a cluster, "The cloud" is a really annoying buzzword for software as a service.
An from my experience clouds are full of unpredictable vapour and they tend to have this annoying tendency to turn to rain - not really something I would want for my data ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I am a clod, you insensitive cloud!
Push email is actually very important when there are donuts in the break room. When you alert everyone they all get the email at the same time and no one gets left out of the Monday morning cofee and donuts feeding frenzy (gotta be fast to get the eclairs, though).
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.
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?
If you need to search through your 100GB of indexed documents, you want to be able to transparently break up that search query over multiple machines.
Actually, it's building the index of the documents that is especially computationally intensive. Particularly chunky is the algorithm to assign a significance score to each document. Once you've done that, actual searching can then be done by merging streams of information suitably, which it is pretty easy to do fast.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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^)