Google’s Reliability “In The Cloud”
When a business looks at moving its IT functions “into the cloud,” there are some obvious cost savings (no more servers to maintain, no more expensive software to license, and so forth), but I still run into people who wonder if their operations will be as reliable as the proprietary systems they’re giving-up.
Over at the Official Google Blog, they explain just how fanatical they are about uptime, pointing-out, “We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged.”
And after having moved more than a million businesses off of expensive, in-house servers, and onto the cloud, that attention to detail has paid-off, with greater than 99.9% reliability.
How does that compare with the old, proprietary technologies?
Using data provided by the Radicati Group, Google compared their average monthly downtime against their biggest competitors – Novell Groupwise, IBM Lotus, and Microsoft Exchange:
The data indicates that the Google Apps mail solution is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than Microsoft Exchange.
If you also factor-in the planned outages that come with maintaining an in-house system, Google’s reliability jumps to more than four times that of a GroupWise solution, and is 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution.
