Mountain View, California — Cloud computing remains somewhat vulnerable when it comes to security, and many of us take the disaster readiness of servers and data centers for granted. But for IT admins from both small and large companies, being prepared for disaster and emergency situations is complicated and expensive issue. Google, in its relentless quest to entice enterprise customers, on Thursday said it has introduced a free disaster-recovery feature called synchronous replication — for its Google Apps lineup, which includes Google Docs, Gmail, Google Sites, Calendar and several others.
In its basic conception, it is the process of backing up data in real-time within Apps to multiple data servers and centers of every piece of data entered into or modified in any of the Apps components, like Gmail, the Docs office suite, Sites and Calendar, so that if there is any failure, the amount of data lost or the amount of time without access to the data is minimized. Hence, the level of protection, both in terms of the amount of data preserved and of service restoration time, is typically only affordable to very large organizations and cloud computing vendors, according to Google.
In a blog post, Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, mentioned that Google Apps customers need not have to worry about backups or disaster recovery.
Disaster recovery solution, he explained, is normally measured in two ways: by the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is how much data a company is willing to lose in the event of any failure, and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which represents the acceptable amount of downtime before service is restored.
For large organizations operating Storage Area Networks (SANs), RPO and RTO targets are oftentimes an hour or less, explains Sheth, and that kind of disaster response usually costs a lot.
“For Google Apps customers, our RPO design target is zero, and our RTO design target is instant fail-over,” he says in the blog post. “We do this through live or synchronous replication: every action you take in Gmail is simultaneously replicated in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, we nearly instantly transfer your data over to the other one that has also been reflecting your actions. Our goal is not to lose any data when it is transferred from one data center to another, and to transfer your data so quickly that you do not even know a data center experiences an interruption.”
Over the years, Google has been regularly appending new Apps components to this “best in class” disaster-recovery canopy, to the point where the entire suite is now covered. Also included are stand-alone Apps components versions, such as regular Gmail, Docs and Sites accounts. “Now we have it across all of our applications,” said Sheth.
He added that Google’s live replication was one of the reasons that the City of Los Angeles decided to move from on-premises e-mail to Google Apps.
Traditionally, synchronous replication can be very expensive for companies. For instance, the price to backup 25GB of data with simultaneous replication can range from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs per employee. But, Google is offering this disaster-recovery protection for free, whose goal in the event of a system failure in a Google server or facility is to lose no data and provide “instant” fail-over for minimal or no downtime, above what is possible with even a very expensive storage area network (SAN), Sheth said.
Google says that exact cost varies with a number of factors such as the number of times the data is reproduced and the choice of service provider.
Nevertheless, Google replicates all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free. In addition, data from Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Video, which covers most of the components in Google Apps, is also synchronously replicated for free.
Of course, Sheth admits that no backup solution system from us or anyone else is utterly perfect, but we have invested a lot of effort to help make it second to none.
“We design for failure,” said Sheth in an e-mail. “We function on such a large scale that there are always servers and server racks that need to be maintained and upgraded. Our infrastructure is designed to give us the flexibility to take action when we need to without impacting users. For example, most corporations take down their servers for a set of time to conduct planned maintenance. We just switch people over to a new data center, and they never notice.”
Apps is free in its Standard and Education versions, and priced at US$50 per user per year in the Premier version, which provides a 99.9 percent uptime assurance. Google officials have said the goal is to raise that assurance to 99.999 percent uptime.
Google Apps is currently being used by 2 million businesses with 20 million active users. The feature is available now through Google Apps.