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.
Re:Wait.. (Score:5, Informative)
It's called a cluster, "The cloud" is a really annoying buzzword for software as a service.
/Mikael
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.
Re:Still beta? (Score:3, Informative)
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: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"
Re:Wait.. (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Re:Umm... (Score:3, Informative)
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 exclude from their SLA.
Re:What about internet downtime? (Score:3, Informative)
Google appliance unfortunately is just for search. Here's to hoping they add app support as well in the future.
Re:Wait.. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
99.99% 2 days outage I had recently. No way! (Score:1, Informative)
i had a 2 day outage which just said 'sorry an error has occurred' there is no way i could be without professional mail or documents for 2 days. I would only consider this for social non-critical uses.