In a blog post on Friday, January 14, 2011, Google announced that they are removing the clause in their SLA that allows for schedule downtime. Until now, downtime of less than 10 minutes was not counted against the SLA and there were times that there were planned maintenance windows where some services would not be available.
According to the post, in 2010, Gmail was available 99.984% of the time for both business and consumer users which translates to approximately seven minutes of downtime per month. Google feels that this seven minutes of downtime compares favoribly when compared to in-house email systems such as Microsoft Exchange. ”The latest research from the Radicati Group found that on-premises email averaged 3.8 hours of downtime per month. In comparison to Radicati’s metrics for on-premises email, our calculations suggest that Gmail is 32 times more reliable than the average email system, and 46 times more available than Microsoft Exchange®,” says the article on Google’s Official Blog.
Google is more than likely able to provide this level of service due to the global network of servers that they disperse their data out over. Back in April 2010, an article on GIZMODO speculated that Google owns more than 1 million servers which account for approximately of 2% of the servers around the world.
Google is the first of the cloud providers that has made this leap, but it will be interesting to see if any of the others try to follow.
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I work in the K-12 Education field as a Technical Support Specialist / Web Specialist at the St. Joseph County ISD in Southwest Michigan. I also do a lot of freelance web development in my free time which I absolutely love doing. I am also an avid gamer when it comes to the PC or the XBOX 360 and have been known to enjoy a good LAN party. 
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