Friday 8 August 2008

Gmail outages

Gmail was out yesterday - off line for roughly fourteen and a half hours. 

This was irritating, but since it was my personal mail service no big deal. The question that interests me is what would happen if one had outsourced email to Google and had such an outage?

Now I'm not picking on Gmail here - I have windows live and yahoo accounts, but I don't use them frequently enough to have any real feel for how reliable they are. Gmail is very reliable, this is the first major outage I've experienced in four years.

On the other hand our corporate mail service has had two six hour outages in the last three years - both caused by SAN problems, and neither of them were comfortable experiences. Is one fourteen hour outage better than two six hour outages?


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