“Google apologizes, explains Gmail outage”

On Tuesday September 1, 2009 Gmail, the email service provided the Google search engine, experience a widespread outage. Ben Treynor, a Google vise president said, "it was a big deal and that Google is working identifying and correcting the errors that lead to the outage." The immediate cause for the outage was that a few servers were taken offline for routine maintenance and while they were offline Google experienced experience an unexpected surge in internet traffic.

Eric Kuhn goes on to mention that at one time users would consider that the problem was stemming from their own internet connection but with social network such as Twitter that old ideology went out the door. People knew exactly why they weren’t getting any serve. According to Kuhn “Gmail problems were a top trend topic on Twitter” (cnn.com, 1)

This article directly correlates with this week’s chapter, chapter five, because two of the main topics in chapter five were backup and recovery. An organization needs to plan how often to backup information and those they also need to plan when and how minimize down time and improve recovery time. One particular method was fault tolerance in which a system has a component embedded in the system that takes over the main system in the event of an outage. Another method is failovers in which a separate duplicate system takes over while the main system is down. According to Treynor, “Google plans to increase router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom” (cnn.com, 1) with 36 million users in the US alone Google should have planned better maintenance schedules.

By: Eric Kuhn
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/01/gmail.outage/index.html