14 DAY TRIAL // One of Google's major focuses is on the enterprise market. It's building up its arsenal and winning small victories with its eyes on a bigger prize in the not-so-distant future. But enterprise services have a few different or extra needs that don't come up with consumer-level apps and services like most of the ones Google is used to serving. One important aspect for any enterprise is disaster recovery, which is critical to any business.
While a regular user may be willing to tolerate longer outages and downtimes and even some data loss to an extent, businesses are much less flexible in this respect and with good reason, every minute of downtime means money and even 1 MB of data lost could prove disastrous.
But being prepared for the inevitable problems is costly and the price grows exponentially with each request. Yet, Google says that it can offer some of the best disaster-recovery options out there, virtually the best possible, and at no extra cost for Google Apps users. So, how can Google do this?
It all comes down to one of the company's major strategic advantages, its great infrastructure. Google can leverage the big number of data centers it has around the world to offer great disaster protection and recovery for free to its customers, but with very little additional costs to the company as well.
"How do you know if your disaster recovery solution is as strong as you need it to be? It's usually measured in two ways: RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). RPO is how much data you're willing to lose when things go wrong, and RTO is how long you're willing to go without service after a disaster," Rajen Sheth, senior product manager, Google App, explains.
"For Google Apps customers, our RPO design target is zero, and our RTO design target is instant failover. 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's also been reflecting your actions," he adds.
Google says that plenty of the apps from the Google Apps suite, Mail, Docs, Calendar and Sites, benefit from this kind of protection. All the 25 GB available in Gmail for Apps as well as all the data stored by the other apps are backed up and replicated several times to ensure that they are always available. With synchronous replication, Google can ensure that, if one data center becomes unavailable, the user won't even notice, as the second one picks up the load. Of course, there are other ways to ensure synchronous replication and other cloud services offer the technology as well.
What makes its approach unique, Google says, is that its huge existing infrastructure ensures that it has plenty of resources on hand to handle the additional load caused by doing everything twice. And it can do this with no additional costs to itself thanks to smart load-balancing technologies. Data centers that aren't seeing much use at one point can donate their spare resources for synchronous replication. Google has been gradually introducing these technologies for Google Apps and they're a great example of how its size offers it a unique advantage over other companies.