Google extends Premier Edition SLA to all Gmail users

The extended SLA guarantees 99.9 per cent uptime

Google has said that it is extending the service level agreement (SLA) it offers to Premier Edition customers to all Gmail users.

The SLA, which guarantees 99.9 per cent uptime, will now apply to all Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Talk customers. The company is seeking to reassure customers after recent outages in service.

“The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime and have continued to have a great Gmail experience with the exception of an outage in August 2008,” said Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise.

“If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service there has been an aggregate 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month over the past year of providing the service. That 10 to 15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there.”

He pointed to recent research by the Radicati Group that found that Google Apps was more reliable than GroupWise, Lotus or Exchange.

“Gmail's reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms,” Glotzbach said.