[LINK] 500,000 Gmail accounts go offline

[Scott Howard]

Just to add a bit of currency to the numbers below...

Google has since stated that the number of users affected was around
150,000, not 500k - around 0.02% of all gmail users.

All users have now been recovered, apparently without data loss.

IMHO, Google handled this *perfectly*.  They had a problem, their on-line
redundancy didn't handle it, but they were prepared for that with off-line
redundancy (tape) and resolved the problem in a relatively short period of
time.

  Scott.



On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Johann Kruse <whassaname at gmail.com> wrote:

> " 500,000 Gmail accounts go offline, some users lose all their data "
>
>
> http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/500000-gmail-accounts-go-offline-some-users-lose-all-their-data-20110228/
>
>
> What do Linkers think about the ramifications of this to business
> communications stored in a consumer cloud email environment?
>
> Gmail is of course a free consumer product without SLAs, but many
> individuals also use it for business.  My cousin is a "freelance"
> actor and lost access to his email for several days, which cost him at
> least one gig.
>
> >From
> http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/03/disaster-recovery-by-google.html.
> ..
>  " For Google Apps customers, our RPO design target is zero, and our
> RTO design target is instant failover. "
>
> Does Google Apps run on different infrastructure to Gmail?  Is this an
> actual SLA for paying customers or only a "target"?  I guess what I
> want to know is - would my cousin have had a better experience if he
> was a paying customer?
>
> What RTO/RPO should business customers expect from a cloud provider,
> and what financial protections if any should there be for lost
> business?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Johann
>
>
> Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft and am not intending to bash Google
> specifically as this could potentially happen to any consumer email
> service including Hotmail - I'm just interested in the consumerisation
> trend and the discussion on SLAs etc, and what paying customers should
> expect from a service provider.
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
>