Tens of millions of people rely on Gmail, and some even pay for the “premier” edition through Google Apps for Enterprises (which boasts one million businesses as customers). So when some enterprise customers had to suffer through a Gmail outage two weeks ago that lasted 30 hours, it made some headlines. As did the bigger Gmail outage last August that affected all users for about two hours.
In a belated blog post that responds to the criticism generated by the most recent outage, Matthew Glotzbach, the product management director of Google Enterprise, says that only “0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users” were affected. He also claims that Gmail is available 99.9 percent of the time, measured by “average uptime per user based on server-side error rates.” That amounts to 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month, including the August outage.
As it so happens, the enterprise version of Gmail comes with a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. Today, Google is extending that guarantee for enterprise customers to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk.
When an essential service goes down in the cloud, everybody notices, but Glotzbach contends that Google’s cloud services are more reliable than competing services run in a corporate data center. To prove his point, he trots out reliability data for enterprise email software from Microsoft, Novell, and IBM, and cm[ares it to Gmail. The results are in the nice chart reproduced above (blue is unplanned outages, red is planned outages):
Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves.
There you have it. Gmail is four times as reliable as Microsoft Exchange. So stop yer complainin’.
Note that this data comes from the Radicati Group. I’m sure Microsoft could drum up some countervailing data showing different results.
Do you think apps in the cloud are more reliable than data-center apps? On average, maybe. Apps in the cloud, though, need to be held to a higher standard. 99.9 percent reliability is nice. But that is not even phone-company reliable. Get back to us when you get to 99.999 percent. Otherwise, we are just going to run this image every time Gmail fails:
Google should have more uptime…like 99.9999 I agree…as the size of company they are.
Certainly did suck to have that outage happen.
Hahaha I’m cracking up at the 99.99% guarantee..
If anyone would like to test my scalability, I created this site over the weekend.
It’s twitter for VC’s and entrepreneurs.
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it looks like it was created in a weekend…. the css in IE 7 sucks, layers are out of wack.
@Scott – You also posted similar “comments” on VentureBeat that spamvertise your URL and tagline… if I noticed, it’s because you annoyed me — not because your site is memorable.
My annoy-sense is pretty good at these things… and you are at 99.99% annoying now.
I could see 5 9s reliability for the premier service (6 is a little ridiculous), but where do we honestly feel justified in asking for that kind of reliability from a free service? For most people, gmail is just personal email, and if it’s down for a half hour here or there, we’ll just check it later.
For those depending on it as their lifeblood, and for those that actually NEED 5 9s or better, free email seems like the beggar’s way out. Let them try to set up their own email service, or pay for something that meets their reliability needs. 99.999 isn’t as easy to offer as most people think.
Why are you relating what a person pays to the service they get?
“For those depending on it as their lifeblood, and for those that actually NEED 5 9s or better, free email seems like the beggar’s way out.”
That implies that a free customer is worth less than a paying customer to Google for the same service. The difference is that one is monetized with ads, the other is monetized by charging a fee. Your implication is that they generate less with ads than being paid directly. I would personally make the same assumption for other reasons, but I don’t think it’s valid to compare the price you pay with the service you get. There must be countless providers that you could hand a hundred dollars a month for email accounts and it will have more downtime than the $40/year Google charges. In today’s world for this service, I don’t think you can compare the price you pay directly with the service you get.
“for those that actually NEED 5 9s or better”
Need? Who ever said anything about giving what people need? You give people what they want – Facebook/Youtube/etc. I’m sure we could all be just fine without those two services, but people want it and so that’s why they get it.
” Let them try to set up their own email service”
That’s not a good comparison either, in my opinion. People want a reliable email service, so that’s what the goal should be – to provide a reliable email service.
I’m relating cost to service quality because it’s a valid, workable business model. You are clearly correct in that ad revenues are generated from free customers, but I was operating under the assumption (perhaps incorrect — I am not a paying gmail customer) that the paid service removes the ads.
That said, they’re offering the service in exchange for ads and the revenue generated from them. Most people seem willing to succumb to this. It certainly behooves them to provide greater reliability as that will build a stronger brand and generate more loyalty… BUT that removes reliability as an incentive to upsell their premier services.
Having seen retail ad rates, it takes one hell of a customer to generate $50 a year in ad revenue, and Google, as impressive as they are, aren’t likely generating that either. So yeah, it’s a simple point — if you need greater reliability, pay for it. Otherwise, here’s a great service for which you give us nothing for aside from your agreement to use.
And as for the need vs. want perspective, PEOPLE might be fine with operating under want fulfillment — businesses don’t have that luxury. It’s likely more acceptable for me to tell my brother that I couldn’t respond to his last-minute invitation because Gmail was down than it is for a business to fail to respond to my customer service inquiry. There ARE people who need reliability, and they’re willing to pay for it.
The point though, really, is that I don’t believe I have the right to impose uptime restrictions on my free service provider. If they aren’t offering what I want, I might complain, but I’d likely just look elsewhere — if nobody were meeting my needs I might pay for such a service. Plenty of people already do.
@Barry Melton – Their talking about Google Apps Premier, which does cost money. You don’t get the SLA if your just using the free gmail.
@Simon — I was mostly responding to Patel’s comment that they should be 6 9s. I understand that Google isn’t providing an SLA for their free service, and I agree that they shouldn’t.
90% of all statistics can be made to say anything… 50% of the time
It works 60% of the time, every time.
And yet these same studies have conclusively shown that a great percentage of studies indicate that statistically these same studies supported their own statistics…
99.9 percent uptime guarantee is simply a strategy by techies to build confidence (www.youtechno.info) just like two lovers assuring each other love till the end of time but not practical at all.
Anyone notice w/ Gmail that annoying “pause” before you can do anything (i.e. scroll, open email, compose an email).
Upon load of a page, there has always been that obnoxious “pause” that really annoys my daily experience w/ Gmail
I’m an Exchange Admin, and my box hasn’t been down in over 3 years. Hmmm, who’s more reliable now?!
Lies!
mail.yahoo.com and hotmail.com have not been down in years. google has much to learn from the big boys. its fine when you are writing applications to see if you are too drunk to email someone, but for real work, google can’t be trusted yet.
“…hotmail.com have not been down in years.”
simply not true
I switched from Outlook to Gmail for my primary business and would never even consider going back. I also used yahoo and hotmail before I made the complete switch. Overall Gmail leaves all of them in the dust. Its not perfect, but it is getting there.
Yahoo’s email is SO much better than Google’s (along w/ every other product Yahoo does), but for some reason Google gets all the publicity. Of course I feel similarly about Apple…only I think their products suck and they still get good pub.
this is quite a funny or not – my Gmail was just down. stalled in ’still working’ mode with ‘pending request to server’
I love gmail. My business runs smooth like buttah because of it.
Outlook is from the 70s.
outlook works great configured with msn or live mail and no google ads surrounding your mail!
http://12tb.com
This has got to be a big lie. Gmail SMTP service is down for 10-15 minutes every other day, at least. IMAP is more reliable but still goes down quite frequently.
Cloud apps will never be 100%, they can claim they are but everything breaks eventually. I think Google are doing a pretty decent job but the main thing is that they are pushing cloud apps instead of living in the past.
They’re doing a good job. In a nutshell, we all depend on technology way too much at times…
Even the post office cant give you a 99.9% guarantee..
SideNote:
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Great jobs site!
99.9% uptime, while it sounds near perfection, isn’t too high as a service provider. After all, 99.9% uptime means 9 hours of downtime in a year.
I’m liking the gwhale.
Google is not showing correct data.It’s impossible to 99.99 reliability.
http://www.iboozi.com
First a little plug. If you don’t like google’s performance, go to http://www.6zap.com and either download and install the software or launch it on Amazon’s cloud, and control it’s uptime
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Back to the main issue of uptime. Uptime on a large scale is really hard. As someone pointed out 99.9% of uptime is 9 hours of outage. The holy grail of five nines, 99.999% uptime, which is what you’re supposed to get with your phone is only 5 minutes of outage a year. That’s not only incredibly hard, but it’s not really measurable until a service has been running for 5-10 years. And let’s not forget, all this software in the cloud keeps changing all the time, which makes it even harder to provide this kind of hard time.
Another way to look at it is: cheap, good, reliable pick any two, where good refers to the features that are added to the apps. Sure we can make products that are reliable and have tons of features. Just pay us $1000/user/year and we’ll build them for you
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I can’t complain too much about my experiences with Gmail. I’ve been using it for quite awhile, and, yeah, it’s gone down a few times, but not too often. It’s great most of the other times. Though I kind of miss having folders rather than the labels system that they have. I was happier with folder, but, it’s nit picking. The search feature is great, so that helps me find what I need right away.
Jake
NoteScribe: Premier Notes Software
gmail was down for 30 minutes, it’s still less than other apps
thanks….
http://www.beymod.com.tr