Google aims to improve reliability

Google is aiming to make email as reliable as the house landline. “Every time you reach for your phone you expect it to work. And we believe that is a worthwhile benchmark.” Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise product manager director wrote in his blog post.

Due to improvements, Google has brought its service level agreement (SLA) up-to-date for the cloud-based Google Apps customers. The scheduled downtime provision has been removed from the contract so reflecting the improvements of uptime – and, Google claims, this is an industry first.

Glotzback explained how there would still be outages in the future as making email as reliable as house phones is ‘no mean feat.’ However, he continued, “We're proud of our track record so far, and we're working hard to make it even better.”

Google Apps reliability in 2010 was 99.984% - explained in downtime this was approximately seven minutes a month, which, mainly came from breaks lasting seconds – and probably totally unnoticed. And, now, even those minutes (all of them) will count in the customers favour.

Recently, an analyst found the average installed email system has 3.8 hours of downtime per month. And apparently, with Google Apps being 32 times more reliable than said system, why would you want anything else?