Fortunately Microsoft Exchange® customers can still benefit from the reliability of Gmail with Google Message Continuity. Comparable data for Microsoft BPOS® is unavailable, though their service notifications show 113 incidents in 2010: 74 unplanned outages, and 33 days with planned downtime.
Email is much more complex than your home phone, so making it as reliable as the dial tone is no mean feat. Despite our best efforts, we will have outages in the future. But we're proud of our track record so far and we're working hard to make it even better. Every time you reach for your phone you expect it to work. And we believe that is a worthwhile benchmark.
1. The Radicati Group, 2010. "Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2010-2011"
Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise Product Management Director
While most discussions of cloud computing and data center design take place at the hardware level, we offer a set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model. For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.
In contrast, with a service like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.
A great example of software infrastructure that scales is the recent online town hall meeting held by President Obama. The White House was able to instantly scale its database to support more than 100,000 questions and in excess of 3.5 million votes, without worrying about usage spikes that typically would be tough to manage. Because of the cloud, there was no need to provision extra servers to handle the increased demand or forecast demand ahead of time. Applications Beyond the underlying hardware and software design, what attracts many customers to the cloud is application outsourcing.
There is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine in the cloud. That server was never designed for the cloud, so you don't get additional scale. You'd also need to continue to maintain and monitor the mail server yourself, so the labor savings are marginal. But with cloud-based applications like Gmail, we take care of all of the hassle for you. We keep the application up and running, and have designed it to scale easily. All of this provides an application that is roughly less than 1/3 the cost of a privately hosted mail system, has 100x the typical storage, and innovates much faster.
Innovation While the cost advantages of cloud computing can be great, there's another advantage that in many ways is more important: the rapid pace of innovation. IT systems are typically slow to evolve. In the virtualization model, businesses still need to run packaged software and endure the associated burden. They only receive major feature enhancements every 2-3 years, and in the meantime they have to endure the monthly patch cycle and painful system-wide upgrades. In our model, we can deliver innovation quickly without IT admins needing to manage upgrades themselves. For example, with Google Apps, we delivered more than 60 new features over the last year with only optional admin intervention.
The era of delayed gratification is over – the Internet allows innovations to be delivered as a constant flow that incorporates user needs, offers faster cycles for IT, and enables integration with systems that were not previously possible. This makes major upgrades a thing of the past, and gives the customer greater and greater value for their money.
As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?
Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps
