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Google Gmail Outage Brings Out Cloud Computing Naysayers
InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs — ... to make sure the Gmail outage didn't go unnoticed. In July, when Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (S3) suffered a service failure for about eight hours, some S3 customers expressed similar worries about the suitability of S3 for businesses. Others dismissed S3's various outages as "few and far between, short, and handled properly." Google's Gmail service-level agreement (SLA) for paying Google Apps customers says the company "shall use all reasonable commercial efforts to ensure that the Gmail Web interface is operating and available to customers 99.9% of the ...

Google Extends 99.9% Service Level Agreement To Other Premier Apps
Pulse2 - Technology News And Reviews — ... Based on these numbers, GMail is 2x more reliable than Novell GroupWise and 4x more reliable than Microsoft Exchange server.  Google is so confident about their reliability that they are extending their 99.9% service level agreement to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk for Premier Edition customers.  This affects about 1 million of Google’s Apps businesses. ...

Google: Actually, Gmail Doesn't Suck (GOOG, MSFT)
Silicon Alley Insider — ... (numbers from The Radicati Group), yes, Gmail is indeed the more reliable solution. We'd include two caveats: It's unfair to include "planned downtime" into the comparison, because enterprises can schedule maintenance for nights and weekends, warning users in advance. And even if Gmail crashes less frequently, the crashes feels worse because the engineers working on it are all off-site and the users have no one to scream at. We also get new service level agreements: 99.9% on ten-minute increments (compare to Amazon's (AMZN) 99.95% on five-minute ...

Google promises reliability for Docs, Calendar
Webware.com — ... "Today, we're announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk," said Matthew Glotzbach, director of Google Enterprise product management, announced on the ...

Google Defends Gmail Uptime, Bolsters Google Apps
InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs — ... . "Instead, when a small number of cloud computing users have problems, it makes headlines." To counter skeptical headlines, Glotzbach offered reliability metrics, in the hope that numbers speak louder than naysayers. And he said that Google has turned its Gmail Service Level Agreement (SLA) -- available to Google Apps Premiere Edition customers -- into a Google Apps SLA . The agreement now covers Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, and Google Sites. Over the last year, Gmail has been up more than 99.9% of the time, he said. Gmail, Glotzbach said, has been ...

Google introduces service-level guarantee for its Apps suite
Latest from Computerworld — ... services. In effect, Google is promising compensation if downtime exceeds around 45 minutes a month -- but it won't count outages of less than 10 minutes' duration towards this total. The SLA conditions define downtime as when the "user error rate" exceeds 5%, as measured on the server side. Customers could therefore experience far more than 45 minutes of downtime, in shorter bursts, without compensation. There'll be no compensation, either, if the downtime is for scheduled maintenance for which Google has given more than five days' advance notice. Scheduled downtime will ...

Google’s Apps SLA Allows It To Minimize Downtime Of Gmail, Calendar And More
TechCrunch — Any Google App could be unavailable for more than 21 hours on a given day, and the company could still claim they had 100% uptime. That’s the gist of an analysis penned by Pingdom, who took a closer look at the Service Level Agreement for Google Apps. The most interesting tidbit in the SLA, which applies for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more (emphasis ours): “Downtime Period” means, for a domain, a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not ...

Google weasels out of uptime promise? Not so fast
Webware.com — ... Pingdom, a company that monitors Web site availability, has concluded that Google gives itself a lot of wiggle room in its service level agreement for its Google Apps service. The service level agreement (SLA) gives credit to paying customers if the service falls short of promised availability--99.9 percent measured monthly for Google Apps. Pingdom points out that because Google only counts downtime periods that last at least 10 minutes, the company could get away with intermittent problems that are shorter. "What if Google Apps was down for 9 ...

Gmail Outage Prompts Apology
TechWeb — ... service, according to comScore, behind Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. While the incident underscores the impact of service availability and the benefit of service level agreements (SLAs) , it also demonstrates the value of enabling ...

Gmail Outage Prompts Apology
InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs — ... service, according to comScore, behind Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. While the incident underscores the impact of service availability and the benefit of service level agreements (SLAs) , it also demonstrates the value of enabling ...

Open Thread: How Much Do You Trust Your Web Apps? [WebWorkerDaily]
GigaOM Network — ... Gmail appears to be back up now, but you can bet that this won’t be the last time a major web app suffers downtime. While we can probably be reasonably confident that Google has the engineering talent to recover from most failures quite quickly (especially as Google’s paid-for Google For Domains users have a service-level agreement, including an uptime guarantee of 99.9 percent), we’ve seen many services suffer from a lack of continued support and investment, and some that ...

Burned By Gmail Outage? Google Will (Almost) Buy You a Postage Stamp [GigaOM]
GigaOM Network — ... Assuming the reports about today’s outage of 2.5 hrs are true that would put Feb uptime at ~ 99.6%. This is a breach of Google’s SLA and the penalty is 3 days of service credit. ...

Google Gmail outage compensation: $2.05 per user
Webware.com — ... For customers who pay the $50 per user per year price for the Google Apps service, Google strives to keep it up and running 99.9 percent of the time each month. According to the Google Apps service level agreement (SLA), Google promises 3 extra days of service if availability slips down to the 99.0 to 99.9 percent range. ...

Google: 'We're Very Sorry'
Forbes.com: Technology News — ... Google to air traffic control. "Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia," he wrote. "And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected." It's still unclear where the service disruption lands Google with its users. Real-time opinion from sites like Twitter suggests users are sensitive to such downtime, although the company's service level agreement allows for about nine hours a year of service downtime. Shares of Google ...

Google's Gmail goes down for at least half an hour; Twitter lights up
L.A. Times Tech Blog — ... For paying customers of Google Apps, the company guarantees that the service will be available at least 99.9% of the time.  Any less, and Google starts to lose money back to businesses, which are credited with free service days based on the extent of the outage. ...

Google Apologizes--Again
Forbes.com: Technology News — ... , which monitors Internet performance, does not indicate any widespread Internet connection issues. According to company policy , Google promises users of its premium services--including but not limited to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk--99.9% uptime, adding extra days of service free of charge if it fails to do so. Google's service agreement means that the company can afford approximately 525,000 minutes of downtime each year. Until Tuesday, the math was playing out in the company's favor. See Also: ...