If your business used Gmail and the service went out for two and a half hours, do you think you lost $2.05 per user in productivity?
That's the monetary equivalent of what Google offered to compensate Google Apps Premier Edition customers after Gmail was unavailable for about two and a half hours on Tuesday. And it was being generous: All it had to offer was the equivalent of 41 cents per user.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)
For customers who pay the $50 per user per year price for the Google Apps service, Google strives to keep it up and running 99.9 percent of the time each month. According to the Google Apps service level agreement (SLA), Google promises three extra days of service if availability slips down to the 99 to 99.9 percent range.
According to a Gmail outage blog posting by Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz, the outage lasted "approximately two and a half hours." By my math, assuming there were no other outages in February, that means uptime of 99.63 percent for the month.
However, Google decided to extend affected customers' service more than the 3 days the SLA required. "Given the extent of the outage and as a gesture of goodwill, we are extending their service for 15-days," spokesman Andrew Kovacs said in a statement. Ordinarily the service has to slip below 95 percent uptime to provide a 15-day extension.
So how does that math work out exactly? Well, at $50 a year, Google charges a rate of 0.57 cents per hour. So a three-day extension is the equivalent of 41 cents of revenue per user, and a 15-day extension is worth $2.05.
Before you judge, bear in mind some of the factors at play--how essential e-mail is to a company, how common Gmail outages actually are, the time of day of the outage, whether e-mail was available through other software such as Outlook even though Gmail's Web interface was down. And another relevant comparison is how reliable your own company's e-mail servers are. You're in effect valuing your employees' e-mail productivity lower than Google does if you have worse uptime than Gmail.
However, whenever Google is apologizing for outages, the company takes pains to mention it feels the pain acutely given how the company uses Gmail internally. My suspicion is that the company values its employees' time a bit more highly than what it grants Google Apps Premier customers.
Google also offered an explanation of what happened on another blog post.
"This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center," Cruz said. "Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control."
source:Stephen Shankland covers Google, Yahoo, search, online advertising, portals, digital photography, and related subjects. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered servers, supercomputing, open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen.
Google Gmail outage compensation: $2.05 per user
SUGENG,Google Released New Personalized Search Feature by Karl Sultana
SUGENG,Google released new features for personalized search. So first you need to have a Google account, which is free and then login.When going to Google.com you can customize the search results. You can move sites up or delete them - put notes next to sites or suggest sites to the results.Truly personalized search results for research purposes is a great feature.
Say you are researching websites to buy food for dogs. So you login to your Google account and go to Google search engine.
Type in dog food or some similar keyword and start checking in the websites. You find one that sucks, because they do not take paypal payments. So you can delete it from the search engine results.
You find one that has the brand of dog food you want, but it's out of stock. So you put a note next to the website (by clicking a small icon in search results)... saying something like: good but out of stock!Say your friend recommends to you a dog store where you can find and buy dog food. So you can add it to the search results (to check it in future)... you can also put a note next to it like: recommended by friend, check it out.So that is just a simple example, but for big researches for school or something like that - it has very handy features other search engines don't yet have.Yahoo and MSN will probably do something like this sooner or later.Remember for time being this is only for personalized search, for those people who have a google account and have to login... for common users who just go to google.com they won't see anything of this sort.There is no help for us optimizers - even though some black hatters try to find some loopholes - maybe mass creating accounts with Google and testing some trick - which sucks, and they will get penalized if they get caught. Sorry not penalized Google bans entire websites that cheat, spam or use black hat.
source...About the Author
Check out Karl Sultana's search engine ranking tips. He has plenty of free resources on his blog, including a free newsletter, Karl's SEO Gossip.
Light Emiting Diode
SUGENG,Money Saving Uses of LED Lights
Do you own any LED lights? Chances are you may have more of these highly efficient little light bulbs than you are even aware of. They show up as indicator lights in computer and electronic equipment, appear in flashlights and remote controls, exterior lighting fixtures and even holiday light strands. They are remarkably efficient and durable, which makes them suitable to a significantly wider range of applications than traditional light bulbs.
What are LED lights? A simple definition is actually not that easy to provide in brief, but basically LED stands for "light emitting diode" which are small electronic units that light up when electricity passes through them.
Traditional light bulbs are radically different from LEDs,
as they use a filament inside of the bulb which lights up when an electrical current is completed. Such light bulbs burn out rapidly and generate quite a bit of heat - in fact touching a lit bulb can lead to a burn. LEDs however stay relatively cool to the touch because they do not operate in the same manner, and are actually more like an old-fashioned transistor than a light bulb.
What this means is that they use electricity far more affectively than their old-fashioned counter parts, and are far less likely to fail. This can be especially important when using them as solar garden lights in a garden environment.
What are the benefits of LED lights? Their main benefit is their remarkable efficiency. While they may cost more at the initial point of purchase, LED lights will last for a very long time. They are resistant to blows, dropping and shock, they are relatively unaffected by continual dimming or turning on and off, they are much smaller and provide a wide range of uses. Additionally, they can appear in many colors through a manipulation of their diode and semiconductor materials, which eliminates the needs for special filters or color applications, which in turn greatly reduces the overall cost of the lighting fixtures in which they appear. Additionally, they do not contain the toxic elements and components of other lighting options, including such heavy metals as mercury which frequently appears in fluorescent lights.
How are LEDs used every day? If you take a quick car trip you will see exactly how LEDs are used in "every day" applications - they are in street lights, automobile signals and tail lights, billboards and signs, exterior lighting such as spotlights on flag poles or strings of Christmas lights, solar post lights, and you may even notice them on security cameras where they are used for night vision purposes.
Clearly LED lights are all around, and their efficiency and ever decreasing costs will continue to make them a popular choice for home, commercial and technological applications.
source.. Author
Jonathan Gal is a solar lighting expert and owner of YCA Solar Lights, an organization dedicated to promoting clean, energy efficient outdoor solar lights usage. To find out more about how solar technology is changing the way we live, especially with respect to lighting, you are invited to visit Jonathan's Solar Lighting site: http://www.ycasolarlightstore.com
