Scripps Employees Called 'Hackers' For Exposing Massive Security Flaw
Suspected PayPal Hackers Seek Deal To Stay Out Of Prison
Google pushes for 99.99% uptime for Google Apps, removes downtime from SLA
Google has announced a couple of changes in its service level agreement (SLA) for Google Apps, and they're both to the benefit of Apps users. First of all, Google has decided to outright remove the clause that allowed for scheduled downtime. Google stresses that it's the first major cloud services provider to do so.
Google has also chosen to amend the SLA so that even downtime that's shorter than ten minutes is going to be counted. That was not previously the case.
In 2010, Gmail was up for 99.984% of the time, for both consumers and businesses. This translates into an average of seven non-consecutive minutes of downtime per month last year.
Google says that this downtime compares very favorably to on-premises email systems -- as you can see in the graph above. The numbers are from research done by the Radicati Group, which found that on-premise email averaged 3.8 hours of downtime per month. Of course, the uptime of on-premises email systems depends on many factors, and your particular system may work (a lot) better, but the point Google is obviously trying to make is that cloud solutions for businesses' email are at least good enough, if not better, than on-premises solutions, at least where downtime is concerned.
Along with sharing this information, Google has made its intentions clear: to make its email service "as reliable as the dial tone", which is usually four nines, or 99.99%.
Google has also chosen to amend the SLA so that even downtime that's shorter than ten minutes is going to be counted. That was not previously the case.
In 2010, Gmail was up for 99.984% of the time, for both consumers and businesses. This translates into an average of seven non-consecutive minutes of downtime per month last year.
Google says that this downtime compares very favorably to on-premises email systems -- as you can see in the graph above. The numbers are from research done by the Radicati Group, which found that on-premise email averaged 3.8 hours of downtime per month. Of course, the uptime of on-premises email systems depends on many factors, and your particular system may work (a lot) better, but the point Google is obviously trying to make is that cloud solutions for businesses' email are at least good enough, if not better, than on-premises solutions, at least where downtime is concerned.
Along with sharing this information, Google has made its intentions clear: to make its email service "as reliable as the dial tone", which is usually four nines, or 99.99%.
Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsD GriffinJan 17th 2011 2:21PM
The problem with this is that switching to the cloud increases the number of points of failure. Instead of only having to worry about your own internally hosted and maintained gear, you now have to worry about your ISP, the peering connection, AND Google versus just your own equipment which you can expedite repairs on.
SimiusJan 18th 2011 11:23AM
@D Griffin Yeah but you are never going to be as good as Google to expedite repairs. Likely ever. Plus if your internet connection drops you probably really can't do (a lot of) work anyway even if you have everything local. Plus again, the cost of hosting and maintaining all that gear is far higher than the costs of the maybe one time a year Google goes down.