Googling Google
Christopher Dawson and Sam DiazGmail outage: The sky is not falling
By Christopher Dawson | February 28, 2011, 10:59pm PST
Summary
Gmail: Still the safest place for your mail. Really.
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Blogger Info
Christopher Dawson
Biography
Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health and educational information systems, with a focus on clinical trials and related statistical programming and database modeling. This focus led him to several positions at Johns Hopkins, then to a large biotech company in Cambridge, and finally, to his own consulting business. Now, he lives with his wife, five kids, a dog, and too many chickens in a small town in north-central Massachusetts where he spent several years teaching and managing technology in his local school district. Now he is a consultant and freelance writer in the areas of educational technology and web-based information systems. He writes a fair amount about his chickens, too.
The blogosphere was buzzing Monday with news of Google’s Gmail outage. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan outlined backup options, while young Zack Whittaker could barely contain his glee that Microsoft wasn’t alone in hosing a major webmail product. And yet, despite the inconvenience, the sky simply isn’t falling. The cloud is alive and well and Gmail remains one heck of a safe place to store your email (and everything else for that matter).
Every time something like this happens, cloud naysayers take the opportunity to tell us why it’s a bad idea to store valuable information out in this mythical, mystical cloud. Those naysayers are usually no fans of Google, since the web giant has so much riding on cloud strategies and would just love for all of us to join them in embracing the unseen, distributed web. It’s not like Google has a competing desktop product for what it does. The Chrome OS only solidifies the idea that computers need merely be portals to the web with anything of value stored and synced across Google’s servers.
And you know what? Count me in. No matter what I do, I’ll never be able to replicate all of data around the world in multiple secure, regularly backed-up servers. I’ll never be able to ensure the sort of uptime that Google does. Even if I download all of my emails from my three Gmail/Google Apps accounts to Outlook or Apple Mail, it’s far more likely that my viciously teething daughter will chew the hard drive right out of my laptop than Google will actually, permanently lose my emails and documents.
Before so many of us began to rely on webmail services, whether Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Windows Live Mail, how often were we worrying about those Outlook .pst files and backing up desktop redirections to make sure that nobody lost an email or a calendar appointment? Even if I had the time, inclination, or wherewithal to be a slave to backups, Google is going to do it better.
That 2 hundredths of 1 percent of Gmail users who were affected by Google’s most recent outage were no doubt panicked and wildly inconvenienced. However, when all else fails, Google even has tape backups from which they can retrieve your stuff if given enough time.
Larry’s suggestion to back up your Gmail to another webmail service (or vice versa) probably isn’t a bad one. If hell freezes over and Google goes bankrupt tomorrow, shutting down their many international data centers, then at least Yahoo will still have your emails, right? Fair enough. But Gmail’s (and, to be fair, Hotmail’s) outages represent a miniscule fraction of the system hours for which there were no outages and for which nobody gave a second thought to where exactly their email lived. Can the same be said for those of us who manage our own mail internally? Probably not.
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Chris Dawson is a freelance writer and consultant with years of experience in educational technology and web-based systems.
Disclosure
Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson is a freelance writer and educational technology consultant. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation. Currently, his only business relationships of interest are with X2 Development Corporation (the supplier of the student information system he administers), Hewlett Packard (the primary vendor for computer hardware in the school district he supports), and Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools). He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby. Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 7-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile. Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. Microsoft gave him a free copy of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards. Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff.Biography
Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health and educational information systems, with a focus on clinical trials and related statistical programming and database modeling. This focus led him to several positions at Johns Hopkins, then to a large biotech company in Cambridge, and finally, to his own consulting business. Now, he lives with his wife, five kids, a dog, and too many chickens in a small town in north-central Massachusetts where he spent several years teaching and managing technology in his local school district. Now he is a consultant and freelance writer in the areas of educational technology and web-based information systems. He writes a fair amount about his chickens, too.More from “Googling Google”
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RE: Gmail outage: The sky is not falling
That the percentage of affected users is low does not mean much. Next time it might be much higher. You can't predict that. What we have seen in two seprate incidents within a few short weeks is that Googles on line servives are vunerable. More than we thought.A server outage is anoying but a potential loss of data is just unforgivable.
It is a big blow in my confidence in cloud storage solutions (not just googles) and I will backup my gmail from now on.
I would advice companies to only consider a cloud based solution if in combination with frequent backups solution which will increase the cost considerably over simple cloud solutions.
RE: Gmail outage: The sky is not falling
Why my posts is not shown?
Agreed Chris.
I have never experienced any issues.
I use both Gmail and Google Apps and am very satisfied.
RE: Gmail outage: The sky is not falling
@Dietrich Well that's it then, no problems with the cloud.RE: Gmail outage: The sky is not falling
@Dietrich T. Schmitz, Your Linux Advocate - No one said here no one isn't satisfied, but, it's all yet another apps, not yet ready for Enterprise. Let's accept it. Recent outage by salesforce.com thru Avanade (Accenture child) went down for an Australian relailer i think, say, the cloud can be used as an additional backup option, not any primary enterprise solution.Guys pls. Dont, dont ever come and support google henceforth.
Oh, pls. Google is one such company run most of thier apps over web in Beta for quite long time, and Gmail was such an app, was in Beta for years. Why in this world such a co. like Google kept it in Beta for so long, made it to general public after several years, went ahead against MS and filed a lawsuit against US State Govt. for they choosing MS Exchange as their email solution, oops...! I'm tired.Now, their site is down, Oops, Gmail ? Then, next week, say comeback and say 0.00001 % accounts are RESET (oops !), then saying it's only 500,000, next day no no, it's only 40,000.
Give me a break ! They created a panic for rest of the 99.999999 % and awakened that Google is yet another Yahoo/Hotmail/Facebook nice to have app's over web, but, not reliable. Better keep it backed up in your local PC's, take 2-3 backup of it in external drives, have it backed up in some cloud servers like Amazon S3/Microsoft Azure thru backupify.com (I searched for one online backup solution yesterday and configured it) and have one of your external safest external drive in a firesafe box, etc.
Pls. dont' come and support Google.
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Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Gmail outage: The sky is not falling | ZDNet
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