IT Support | Gmail Outage - World Panics - Sky Not Falling.
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Thu, Mar 10, 2011
- by David, "Gingerbread", Quiram
On Monday there was an issue with the Google mail system that affected 40,000 users (though there are some reports of up to 500,000 from non-Google sources). The users could not access their email and contacts during the outage. At first it was suspected the data was lost, but Google later reported that was not the case, the data was inaccessible due to a storage software update issue. The data access was resorted within 24 hours.
I have made the recommendation in a blog back in September of using Gmail as a tool to make your business more resilient to a localized disaster (i.e. loss of building, vandalism, theft) and keeping your email accessible during the recovery. I still recommend it. In fact in light of how the issue was handled by Google, I recommend it even more. .
Google addressed the issue quickly and fixed it. The storage software update was halted as soon as the forums were lit up with requests into why users "lost" their emails and contacts. Think about it, the forums got the news of issues. Then that information was communicated through the company to the Engineers who identified the problem and stopped it from affecting other storage sites. It isn't like these people all work in the same room. Google is huge well over 20,000 employees. The restore portion of the event is what took the 24 hours.
That being said I am sure that there are those who are not convinced and see this outage as just another in a line of outages from 2009, two years ago. Yeah, there were several outages in 2009 and one this March. Things happen. No computer system is fail-safe. Nothing is, things fail. It is having a DR plan and protocols to follow during outages and disasters that make up for it.
Let’s looks at the pros and cons here from this most recent outage:
Cons:
- You are relying on someone else to run your email accounts.
(Well you would be anyway; someone has to manage it be it on site staff, Managed Service Company. Having Google do it is free and they will maintain their technology and provide the staff for it)
- Google is not immune to outages….frankly no one is...not even the uptime of 99.99999%, there is still some outages in there. So there will be downtime.
- The responsibility of communication is on Google's side. You can contact them about issues, but there is no recourse of action if they do not communicate back.
Pros:
- Google has shown that they are committed to make the Gmail system work and provide the service. They will get it fixed and they have the right people to do it. This particular issue will not happen again. Ever.
- Google responded to the issue quickly and stopped it from affecting other storage systems. Less than 1% of the total Gmail users were affected.
- Google still has the redundancy of hot sites and physical backup. Services which are out of most business price range. This service usage is Free!
- Comparatively the amount of downtime that business experience with their own internal email is much longer than the 24 hours experienced by Gmail users.
Overall using Gmail is not a larger risk after the latest outage. There are the same risks as before that is inherent in using cloud resources. Google has shown that they have the capability and drive to recover from outages that just cannot be matched by smaller business and it is free. If you'd like to hear more about specific Disaster Recovery plans, please contact Trigon at your earliest convenience! If you'd like to hear more about Google Apps, contact our friends at Mosaic.
