Extended Gmail Outage Frustrates Admins 430
CWmike writes "A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored. At about 5 p.m. US Eastern on Wednesday, Google announced that the company was aware of the problem preventing Gmail users from logging into their accounts and that it expected to fix it by 9 p.m. on Thursday. Google offered no explanation of the problem or why it would take it so long to solve the problem, a '502' error when trying to access Gmail. Google said the bug is affecting 'a small number of users,' but that is little comfort for Google Apps administrators. Admin Bill W. posted a desperate message on the forum Thursday morning, saying his company's CEO is steaming about being locked out of his e-mail account since around 4 p.m. on Wednesday. It's not the first Gmail outage. So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers? And a more immediate question: Why no Gears for offline Gmail access at very least, Google?"
Re:Stallman is laughing (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention it is a "free" service, no one has a right to demand it to be up anyway. You are storing your e-mail on google's servers and you pay nothing for it. If they need access to their crucial time-sensitive data then they should keep it themselves or pay for a service which will guarantee availability.
Some of these companies are paying customers. The headline only mentions Gmail, but this is also about Google Apps as a whole.
Re:You get what you pay for! (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't anyone RTFA?
$50/yr for each user is not "free". Nor is it in the domain of "you get what you pay for". $50 per user is actually a rather significant sum when we're talking about 100+ user companies.
There is an SLA for paying customers (Score:5, Informative)
Quote from article: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers?
Paying customers of the apps Premium account level DO have a service level agreement.
Free customers do not however which is probably what they were trying to say.
Revised quote: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for free customers in addition to paying customers?
From the terms of service for Premier account edition:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html [google.com]
1.9. *Service Level Agreement*, or *SLA* means the Service Level Agreement located at the following URL: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/sla.html [google.com]
Downtime period is a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime
Service Credit is
three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9
seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0
fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.
You must request your service credit. It is not automatic.
Google SLA (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html [google.com]
There you go, the SLA for Google Apps. It's listed at 99.9%
But... the remedies for them failing that suck, only up to 15 days worth of service per month will be credited.
Also, it costs $50 per user per year
Re:Outage Outrage (Score:5, Informative)
That's just it, google DOES charge for the hosted apps version of Gmail. See http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html [google.com] for more info.
Re:Offline mail access? (Score:2, Informative)
Does it include a reverse bayesian filter to generate stock market and h3rb@l \/i4gr@ spam?
Re:Better check your backups... (Score:3, Informative)
Um. I can't find where they made this excuse...
Re:Outage Outrage (Score:3, Informative)
Google Apps for Business [google.com]
Claims right on that page that it provides 99.9% uptime.
Re:That's SaaS for you... (Score:2, Informative)
So if you were in control of your destiny then your email servers may still be down however you are the one the needs to fix the problem...
Also there is a case of being smart with you SaaS models, You can often get it so you can get your own data back when you request it. If GMail no longer fits their business model. Well move the data to an other SaaS. Email is kinda easy to move around.
You sound like a guy who is afraid to Fly. Even though you may be statically better off flying then driving however if you don't have the control in your hands you are more nervous.
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Better check your backups... (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/33131
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:5, Informative)
Google Apps is a hosted service sold to businesses, Google are meant to provide that redundancy, and in theory they should be in a much better position to provide it than most small to medium size companies' IT departments.
In practice they seem to be sucking a bit.
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, but the total downtime I've ever caused ALL of my employers over my career has been a LOT less than 28 hours! Heck, even if you add up the downtime for all of the single systems I've admined their collective downtime is probably only close to that. I'm not bragging, I'm pointing out how bad of an outage this is. The only other outages I've personally heard of that were this bad are hosting providers who have critical systems physically damaged and a failed Exchange 2000 pilot at Cisco (They had a corrupted datastore that was so bad that MS and HP and EMC couldn't recover it so they had to fall back to a tape restore which took something similar to this gmail outage)
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:4, Informative)
Yet amazingly enough planes crash. They crash quite often in fact. In fact from what I remember the chance to die per hour of travel is roughly the same between airplanes and cars. In other words the chance of dying from some random outside event is probably much higher in an airplane per hour of travel. So yes, a safe driver is much less likely to die in a car than in an airplane.
Re:These guys need a brain transplant... (Score:3, Informative)
How do you figure it's not that hard to run your own mailserver? Please tell me how to achieve the following, simply.
1. POP and IMAP access for all users
2. Simple ability to delegate administrative rights for the domain including creation of new user rights
3. Ability for users to manage aliases
4. Ability for users to manage mail lists
5. Spam prevention with similar success rates (including very low false positives) to Gmail or any other mass mail site
6. Webmail
7. Simple password changing for users
8. Authenticated SMTP
9. Simple SPF
I've spent a lot of time and effort, and have a good smtp / imap / pop / webmail solution [penguinpowered.org], but it's still cobbled together from loads of stuff and it's still missing solutions to allow users to change passwords and delegate administration control of a domain.
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:the "small IT shops are worse than SaaS" BS (Score:1, Informative)
It should take google nill time to get back up after a data centre burns down because they have more than one. The failure point of your system is the fact that it is centralised - but being on a university you have little choice over that - and little reason to distribute your datacenters geographically - so you don't have failover.
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:3, Informative)
It works well enough that I can run it from my own server and access my email in places where gmail might be blocked or otherwise difficult to access directly. which is all I need it for.
Re:the "small IT shops are worse than SaaS" BS (Score:3, Informative)
If Google's datacenter burns to the ground, how long do you think you'll be without your GMail account?
But that's one of the strengths of using gmail.
The loss of a complete datacenter for them would be a minor issue which would cause slow access. Accidental removal of one part of their infrastructure doesn't cause much of a problem. It's the administrative issues that get replicated across the network that cause major issues.
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:the "small IT shops are worse than SaaS" BS (Score:3, Informative)
You work as the administrator. Your job is probably administering the system... Take You salary and add say 30% for your benefits. 35k - 90k depnding on your location vs. Say you use a professional SaaS shop and pay say $2000 (not just google free service) a month for the same services, that is 24k a year. With the $2000 a year service you are probably a good customer thus they make sure they are up. If not they will work just as hard as you to keep it running. This shop may have 10 - 20 people working on those servers if there is a problem they will go and fix it.
Dont confuse the Free Gmail as a true SaaS.
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:1, Informative)
Sure it's and excuse - and a valid one...
Everyone knows gmail is in beta - that leaves a huge loophole for issues like this in Google's favor.. If you're in a car running on beta tires, and you have some understanding of what that means (as such, the admins that have outsourced their email do by nature of their position) - if your car gets a flat due to one of those beta tires going boom, are you going to whine to the tire company that you missed a meeting because of it? Only if you want to look like more of an ass than you already do for using a beta product in a production environment.. People who know what all things "beta" entails use gmail, but they also have backups just in case..
Re:The benefits of cloud computing (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to argue features or speed or something like that then I will listen, but arguing against Google Apps because of reliability is lame and you don't have much going for that argument.