Today Google is touting the reliability of Gmail, and comparing the service to several “on-premises” solutions in terms of downtime and lost productivity. In a post on the Official Google Blog, Google Enterprise Product Director Matthew Glotzbach writes:
We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008.
If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry.
Glotzbach then breaks out some research from the Radicati Group showing the amount of downtime other solutions experience, which can account for hours of lost productivity for their users (particularly when IT Staffs are taken by surprise by that downtime).
So Glotzbach says that Google is extending the 99.9% “guarantee” to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. While Yahoo seems to be obsessing over “openness,” it appears Microsoft isn’t the only one doing so over “the cloud.”
