ie8 fix
Click Here

Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Google: Aiming for 99.99 percent uptime with business Gmail

By | October 7, 2009, 10:01am PDT

Google executives addressed recent Gmail outages and noted that the company is currently running at a 99.9 percent reliability rate. The goal: Be at 99.99 percent by the end of the quarter.

Speaking at a powwow with reporters, Google Sergey Brin spent a bit of time talking about the search giant’s enterprise efforts. Last week, IBM launched a rival to Google Apps for business that undercuts Google on pricing and promises more reliability.

Brin said that Google was farther ahead on email and collaborative document editing and is adding features for the enterprise. Brin also added that Google was focusing on not just its outages, but the response to them.

For instance, one outage could have been resolved in five to 10 minutes, but the company made errors that extended recovery time to an hour. Brin said the company is also working to group customers so one outage has a limited impact.

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Topics

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

6
Comments

Join the conversation!

Just In

Who would be that careless ...
LBiege 7th Oct 2009
to store business sensitive emails online at a third party server in the first place?
0 Votes
+ -
Statistically, Google can say they have a goal of 99.99% uptime, but the question remains, over what period of time? If it's over the course of a year, Google could have just shy of 9 hours per year of downtime and still be able to say they've met this goal. I wish hosting/cloud computing/SSA companies would change this practice of touting "99.99% uptime". If you stretch the period of time you are benchmarking, you can make your uptime 99.99%. It's simple division. Instead why not set more stringent marks, (ie. no more than 2 service interruptions per quarter). Also, post your track record, if you are being proactive and actively managing/monitoring your service delivery resources, the results should speak for themselves.
0 Votes
+ -
Bad math
drobinow 7th Oct 2009
You've got a decimal out of place. 99.99% is about 53 minutes per year.
I'd be OK with that. Your mileage may vary.
0 Votes
+ -
Who would be that careless ...
LBiege 7th Oct 2009
to store business sensitive emails online at a third party server in the first place?
Bad aim! Should aim for 100% always!
___K___
Google's trying to wipe the egg off their face from recent events. I don't think anyone is going to fall for it.
They need real time support not just forums.

Join the conversation!

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]
ie8 fix

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources
ie8 fix