Google Apps Gets a 99.9% Guarantee 155
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.
Umm... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Exactly. How many minutes per month of downtime inclusive of anything, for any reason?
Re:Umm... (Score:5, 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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Well you could have 90 downtime like this and still count? If it's down for 9 minutes, up for 1, down for 9 etc.
But of course measuring it googles way that would still be 100% uptime.
Re:Umm... (Score:5, Interesting)
My big concern with this type of offering is it increases a companies dependence on their internet line. If your network is down not only can't retrieve files, email or browse, you now can't work on productivity software either. Essentially if your doing a job that requires a computer in this environment you can't work whenever the internet or network has a hickup. I like having something else to do in the rare instances where the network isn't working right.
Add to that the fact that wireless/laptops are becoming of larger importance in companies (and wireless is flaky at the best of times IMHO) you're really courting disaster not just in terms of outages but in terms of accidental data loss. Say your not so gifted technologically colleague decides to walk over to your desk with their laptop to show you the spreadsheet they've been working on. They get out of range of the router that they were using and presto session time out and the chance of data loss.
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Buggy offline access via Google Gears helps alleviate the internet connection issue - it might also alleviate what downtime actually occurs.
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Is that 99.9% uptime or 99.9% planned uptime? Many companies refer (rather facetiously) to *planned* uptime, which means that you can have unlimited downtime so long as it isn't unplanned.
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The concept of "unplanned downtime" seems to originate in the banking world, where something as benign as daylight savings time could force you to take down the mainframe for two hours. It has unfortunately spread to other industries (healthcare records management pops up). The real question is if Google's application architecture requires planned downtime for the service as a whole or individual users.
Based on their roots, I would expect them to be able to do any upgrades in the ten minute window they exc
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The concept of "unplanned downtime" seems to originate in the banking world, where something as benign as daylight savings time could force you to take down the mainframe for two hours.
What are you talking about? I take it you've never seen or touched a mainframe.
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How would you notice a 60 second email outage unless you were running synthetic tests designe only to detect an outage. In normal use all you would see is a 60 second delay in email delivery.
One could even define email as a service that deliveres messages in a "short" time of about 5 minutes. If you accept this definition of email then a 60 second outage is not even an outage as long as emails do get delivered wthout a "short" time.
So I think Google is OK to not count such sort drop outs. email was never
Wait.. (Score:1)
Re:Wait.. (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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A Beowulf cluster?
Re:Wait.. (Score:4, Informative)
It's a King Arthur cloud, maaan. Get with the times!
Re:Wait.. (Score:5, 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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I just completed a report on this subject for a class that I've posted online. I discuss the specifics of Google's clustering technology.
http://googlepleasehireme.com/ [googlepleasehireme.com]
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I just completed a report on this subject for a class that I've posted online. I discuss the specifics of Google's clustering technology. http://googlepleasehireme.com/ [googlepleasehireme.com]
You don't seriously expect Google to hire you based on that "paper" do you? It's 5 pages, of which 3 to 3.5 are consumed with big oversized (and sometimes uncaptioned) pictures and whitespace. The rest reads like a marketing brochure written for people with no technical background.
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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.
Re:Wait.. (Score:4, 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.
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Yeah, punch those bastards. Punch 'em so hard they'll go flying up high in the sky. In the cloud, even.
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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 ;)
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And if you enter a cloud, you usually get lost. Flying in clouds is regarded as very bad thing if you can void it.
Re:Wait.. (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?
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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?
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 ...
Counter-pedantry (Score:2)
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!
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Err, yes, -ish.
Use-mention distinctions are not necessarily indicated by quotation marks.
In Warll's statement [GGP] "Google doesn't have 100% uptime" it was clear that Google is a placeholder for a real-referant and not a mention. But that real-referant is not *the company bearing the name "Google"* [GP] but a non-specific service of that same company.
But it seemed more pedantic to claim contrary to the Anon. Cow. [GP] that it was a mention, by which [of course] I do not mean it but Google.
Clear?
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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...
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Seriously? You must not use it much.
What about internet downtime? (Score:5, 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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what use are webserver, email server, IM servers if your internet is down anyway?
Re:What about internet downtime? (Score:5, 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.
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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.
Isn't that problem the idea behind Google Appliances? :BAM: locally hosted Google products.
You plug it into your network and
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Google appliance unfortunately is just for search. Here's to hoping they add app support as well in the future.
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If you're using Gmail, you could avoid this problem with an IMAP client. Of course, that may defeat the point of Gmail...
The other cool point about web apps is: If your Internet goes down, you can go wandering. Maybe there's some nearby wifi you can leech. Maybe you go to Starbucks. Maybe you go home.
With an internal server, if you lose power, you're SOL. If your server is down, you're also SOL. If a worm runs rampant, bogging down network traffic and even making your desktop unusable, guess what? You're sh
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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.
I can't im somebody, but I sure can queue outbound mail and read already delivered mail....I use IMAP with gmail.
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You apparently have an operational budget that probably has an extra zero over ours. We don't even have UPS for the network, which takes the whole lot out for a while every 3-4 months. Having had both the power substation for the cluster of buildings we're in, and the power substation for the network a few hops upstream, catch fire, hopefully they've fixed a lot of the old hardware that was causing those power outages, but...
I suppose if you've got the network, Google stuff makes sense. For us, we'd love a
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My company's IT budget is likely a good order of magnitude smaller-- 20 person organization. Not having your network on UPS is just stupid!
We are in a major metropolitan area, but we have a UPS for workstations even if they are being used by a part-time student just above minimum wage. We get about four hits a year, and that alone is enough for it to make sense.
We also have a T1 and ADSL from different providers. While automated failover isn't in place, it is on our list as time allows.
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For systems I'm directly responsible for, we've got three cases. There's desktop systems, which are actually laptops, so they have their own UPS essentially. Servers doing useful work have a UPS. Servers that can die and no-one notices for three weeks (real story) don't.
Unfortunately, I don't make the policy beyond my own research group. I hope they're going to start UPSing the network as they have funds, but it's going to be an ongoing task.
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It's called backhoes and they will eat up your uptime in one scoop.
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Well that's good thinking, I remember hearing about someone who bought connectivity from two different companies to have a redundant circuit, unfortunately both companies bought traffic through the same cable upstream, so every spring their connection got eaten by a backhoe.
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Heh, you don't think Cisco equipment with redundancy up the ass goes down every now and then as well? Try managing 1500 boxes.
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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
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And if you are a big enough customer you'll likely have fiber to one of the various pops out there, and you can just buy a cross-connect directly to google's peering network. I don't know if anyone that size has yet to sign up for hosted gmail. I know a couple of schools have rolled it out.
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Obviously the answer to the question "what is the average company's LAN/WAN downtime" is 42
3 9's is meaningless without customer support (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Microsoft has 5 nines ... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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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.
Keep in mind that most software comes with no warrantee whatsoever that it will be worth what the marketing propaganda says it will be.
Also, I don't think that Google would put out a product like this without adequate support. And if your only problem you have with the software is only getting 99.9% availability, then a simple status webpage wou
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Google Domains its Premier membership is something like $45 per year and definitely has a support number which you can call.
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so it's all propaganda unless you have someone to complain to on the phone? you know that customer support reps usually aren't the ones that maintain servers/networks or fix them when they go down, right?
if it makes you feel any better, you can pick up the phone and call your ISP and bitch at them until the problem is fixed. i mean, it's all the same. it's not like complaining to customer server/tech support ever gets a service outage fixed.
this is a service agreement. it states their company policy, and if
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so it's all propaganda unless you have someone to complain to on the phone? you know that customer support reps usually aren't the ones that maintain servers/networks or fix them when they go down, right?
If a company is willing to allocate staff to liasing with a customer, they're more likely to make the technicians aware of the problem in a timely manner and it is more likely to be fixed sooner. They're also more likely to have good technical staff if they have decent customer facing staff.
it states their
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And what is it you want to hear from the person on the phone? That they know there is a problem? That they are working on it?
That they'll pass it on to someone who will momentarily know about it and work on it.
Server uptime is not the issue. (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.
Re:Server uptime is not the issue. (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.
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Stupid observation equals a stupid answer.
If service is bad, dump service. If you are not responsible for policy decision, bring it to who is.
This applies to any non-monopoly. Google is not a monopoly in the cloud (vapor) business, nor are they in the app business.
Re:Server uptime is not the issue. (Score:4, 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.
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Very rarely? I worked for three companies over the last 7 years, I can remember losing internet connectivity exactly once: we were down for 3-4 hours after a construction crew damaged our T1 line.
Hell, I lose my home connection only once or twice a year.
great, now all we need (Score:1)
is an internet service that's 99.9% reliable, or this is all moot
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Your Net (Score:2)
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).
Nothing has 100% uptime (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
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Re:Nothing has 100% uptime (Score:5, Funny)
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"... his Google Apps spellchecker only has a 99.9% SLA, you ignorant clod!"
Yeah, but he missed 2 characters out of 12, that makes just 83.3%, you spellchecker SLA infringing clod!
Still beta? (Score:1, Insightful)
If their service is so solid, then why not remove the 'BETA' tag from Gmail?
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What I actually posted (Score:5, Funny)
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.)
wouldn't like to be customer support on this one. (Score:1)
Wow, that's pretty terrible (Score:5, Informative)
This whole "new web" thing is very pretty, but it seems like about three steps back to me.
Re:Wow, that's pretty terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, but you need to remember that ten years ago, vendors like HP, Sun, DEC, and SGI (IIRC) were putting uptime guarantees in their marketing. IBM wouldn't guarantee uptimes, but they would state the average mainframe had less than 5 minutes of downtime a year. Strangely, Microsoft was pushing Windows as "Enterprise Class", but would make no uptime guarantees. Guaranteeing your clients 5 nines of uptime is nothing new in the enterprise market. It wasn't until Microsoft started pushing Windows as a ser
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I hate to tell you this, but your 'Homepage' website is down. What happened to the 4 nines now, batman? :)
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I was actually working with a client on an SLA with a co-lo facility recently. The co-lo would only commit to three nines, despite the fact that their infrastructure should theoretically support a solid four nines. They keep that extra order of magnitude in their back pocket-- be it to improve profit margins later or "value-added" services soon to come.
You have to keep in mind that statistical reliability and real-world availability are different animals. Some of it comes down to luck, and some is about
Push (Score:2)
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Gmail might have a better uptime than Exchange, but at least Exchange has push-email.
Why is push better in practical terms than, say, a 1-minute pull?
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Why is push better in practical terms than, say, a 1-minute pull?
How many "donuts" [sic] can you eat in a minute ...?
What is more imprtant is... (Score:1)
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
What's The Recourse? (Score:1)
99.9 is not so good (Score:2)
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
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Google isn't a 9 to 5 shop, I don't think.
99.9% is merely good advertising copy. (Score:2)
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Cars don't get anywhere close to 99.9%, since just a flat tire can take you out for a while, nevermind a broken transmition. If you need to let the car sit overnight, thats pretty much done for. And well over 50% of flights are delayed, even just 99% reliability is a pipe dream (i know you basically meant plane crashes, but still).
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Cars don't get anywhere close to 99.9%, since just a flat tire can take you out for a while, nevermind a broken transmition.
Example, I ordered a new shock absorber and was sent the wrong part ... silly me removed the old one (broken) before checking the new one. Downtime 1 week = 2% (send back parts, order new ones from a company that knew what part they should have sent me!).
I'd guess adding up time for refuelling would give you less than 99.9% uptime.
Sysadmin = Punching Bag (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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One of our sysadmins called and basically was told that some accounts were temporarily unavailable (duh!), that the problem would be solved as soon as possible, and to check the forums for public announcements. (And yes, we are a premium customer).
That's how you spot crappy support: when you get a list of symptoms (that you already know) and no specific cause or resolution process other than "the engineers are working on it". No valuable info to pass to the end users to calm them.
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Customer care basics: communication! Keep your customer aware of what is going when there is a problem, tell him what you do to get it fixed and try to provide an ETA for the resolution. This way the user don't feel like he is kept in the dark and stress level will go down a notch or two. Look at how Tylenol handled the poisoned bottles crisis in the early 80's; this is textbook crisis management.
Google is going the other way: being vague, hiding behind its interpretation of the SLA, etc. They might be very
Penalties? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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That was my question as well. I think it's especially important to have answered given that Google has already failed to meet a 99.9% uptime at least once this year.
When they fail in that way, how long is it before they are able to make a particular uptime claim again? Apparently the answer is "less than a few months" at best. I suspect it's actually "immediately" instead of the more appropriate "when they prevent their service from going down long enough to meet the stated uptime percentage including stati
Gmail is broke! (Score:2)
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)
99.9% uptime of a pain in the butt? (Score:3, 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^)
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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.