Comments on: Google Outage and Rebate – Is 95% email uptime good enough?

By: Gmail Still More Reliable Than Many Corporate Email Systems | Finley & Cook, PLLC

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:49:55 +0000

[...] The research company Gartner estimated that corporate systems are available around 95% of the time in a blog post earlier this [...]

By: Google Apps: Consumer SLAs for Enterprise Business | Cloud Computing and Bad Behaviour

Tue, 12 May 2009 01:29:02 +0000

[...] John Pescatore from Gartner highlighted some interesting aspects to the Google Apps Service Level Agreement – for instance “The Google Apps SLA does not apply to…any performance issues: (i) caused by factors outside of Google’s reasonable control” (clipped for efficiency, read the full extract and John’s comment at his blog at Gartner.com) [...]

By: Andrew Barker

Andrew Barker — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:22:17 +0000

From a European perspective you are on the wrong tact entirely. The problem is less the outage (although it hit us when we are awake!). But the service that is left behind is very basic HTML. So if you have the temerity to want to read an email, the likelyhood of it failing is 90% and forget anything else.

So the outage is not really 4hrs, it continues as we speak for most of us. Google may be protecting their core North American region. But to all intents and purposes the rest of the World is out!

Andy

By: John Pescatore

John Pescatore — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:42:16 +0000

Lydia – all well and good, but if Google wants to be in the business of selling services to enterprises, vs. putting ads in front of consumer eyeballs, it will have to do better. It really doesn’t matter to an enterprise employee that Google is engineering their plumbing to higher standards – if the toilet doesn’t flush when I need it, it is broken.

By: Lydia Leong

Lydia Leong — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:34:05 +0000

Well, service providers like IBM have the “reasonable control” clause in their contracts, too, and a lot more verbiage besides.

Google doesn’t even get the grace of maintenance windows. A 1:30 am outage for folks in the US would probably not draw blinks in the internal enterprise — but because Google is 24×7 global, they get zero breathing room. Their outage was the result of a software update, in the end. In the enterprise (or in most outsourcing arrangements), you get a window in which to do such upgrades in which downtime is expected.

I think the irony of running an email infrastructure the size and scope of Google’s is that you are actually engineering to a heck of a lot higher standards that you do within the enterprise. You can unplug a rack full of Gmail servers and the service will keep chugging along seamlessly. Unplug an Exchange server in the enterprise, and not only will your email come to an immediate halt, but there’s some non-negligible chance it won’t come back up smoothly, either. And it’s not like the code quality of commercial email packages is necessarily any higher than Gmail’s. It’s just that your tiny software bug or even quirk can get magnified a millionfold into a massive outage when it happens to be what runs Gmail.

By: Russ Malz

Russ Malz — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:02:45 +0000

John –

Excellent point, and I agree with Paul Lopez (above). Google is a good choice for a consumer, and their mail product has some nice functions. That said, Google email and aps were not engineered for the enterprise.

By: Paul Lopez

Paul Lopez — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:33:15 +0000

John - Good call on the SLA calculation. As you point out, a large block outage is more severe than many smaller ones. In fact, how often do we get intermittent interruptions with Exchange? After all, this is asynchronous, best efforts. What troubles me is the expectation of some enterprise class service from an Internet search company. Paul Lopez