Google cries foul over coverage of Apps outages
Recent outages affecting Google Apps have received a disproportionately large amount of coverage from the technology press, resulting in a misperception about the stability of this hosted collaboration and communication suite.
That's the opinion of Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google's Enterprise unit, who recently chatted about this issue with IDG News Service, one of the news outlets that Google feels has blown the problem out of proportion.
Glotzbach's view, which he outlined in a recent blog post, is that the availability and performance of Web-hosted software, like Google Apps, gets more scrutiny because its outages occur publicly in the Internet cloud. The press coverage creates a wrong perception about the overall reliability of cloud applications versus that of on-premise software.
For example, Gmail's availability, measured as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates, has been north of 99.9 percent over the last year, which works out to an aggregate of 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month, according to Glotzbach. That's lower, he points out, than the 30 to 60 minutes average unplanned downtime that, according to a recent Radicati Group, hit on-premise e-mail systems, which also cost more to acquire, install and maintain than Google Apps.
In the interview, Glotzbach put into what Google's considers a proper perspective the several outages in August and October that left some Apps users unable to access their Gmail service for 24 hours or more. An edited version of the conversation follows.
IDG News Service: Would you like to recap the main points in your recent blog post about Gmail's and Apps' reliability and performance?
Matthew Glotzbach: The reliability of the cloud overall is under more scrutiny than the average enterprise IT system reliability, and that's fine. I think it's good to hold the cloud to a higher standard. However, the perception potentially of people is maybe overstated relative to the reality. Right now, when we have the most minor of an issue that may affect an infinitesimal small number of people, it's being picked up and talked about as if it's affecting a large portion [of users.] I'm not saying that it's acceptable to have [outages]. I realize the expectation is 100 percent reliability and that's the goal: to be 100 percent reliable so that there is no discussion because it's always available. That's the gold standard we've gotten with Google.com and that's where we want to get Google Apps as well.
IDGNS: Why are you experiencing outages of 24-plus hours in Apps' Gmail?
Glotzbach: It's very rare that any one user is out for that length of time. Even when there's a report of an outage, if the total duration of the outage was 24 hours or 12 hours, whatever the case may be, it's very common that during that period a user may be affected only for 10 minutes or something like that.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
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Get a clue
Google needs to understand that email, even for the individual, is considered to be a mission-critical application. A day without mail (24 hour outage, in other words), will cause the villagers to gather in front of the castle with pitchforks and torches. A crowd of villagers is going to attract attention, particularly if the crowd numbers in 6 or 7 figures.The other part of that is the villagers not knowing what's going on in the castle. During an outage, lack of complete, current, and transparent communication is even more serious than the outage itself as it drives and contributes to escalation of the reaction of the users. Google has been supporting mail for years now, and to act like this is all overblown is just plaid stupid.
It's really pretty simple and fact-driven: Users react badly to email outages. Acting like it's no big deal causes them to become outraged, not just upset. If you want to be in the business, you need to accept what comes with it.
It didn't work for the GOP, it won't work for Google...
That's right, blame it on the MEDIA instead of taking responsibility for not being able to keep your infrastructure up and running. It may come as a surprise to all those bright folks at Google that building enterprise applications to compete with Microsoft, IBM and others is alot harder than a search engine.Get a clue II
Google is seemingly cluless as to the realitiesof every day Internet activites and avaliablity
expectations, privacy, and security.
Given Googles seemingly ever increasing bad
managment judgments of late with Android, Gmail
security and avaliability, and Chrome's poor
design and security. Had Googles operational
staff and leadership done more to insure Gmail's
operational stability, tested it's Android and
Chrome service product entries prior to avaliability
to users, they would likely not be under such
close observation and recieving very reasonable
complaints and exposier of same, of users and
customers accrodingly.
Ergo, Google needs to stop whining!