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Two Weeks Later: Mobile Me's Uptime Calculated (96%)
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better than speakeasy
My company uses servers and webhosting with worse uptime than that. I do agree that they should strive for excellence since Apple's reputation is based on how stable and reliable their systems are however...
My company uses servers and webhosting with worse uptime than that. I do agree that they should strive for excellence since Apple's reputation is based on how stable and reliable their systems are however...
My web hosting company guarantees me no more than four minutes downtime per month, so MobileMe has a lot of room for improvement--however, it is improving, and that is a very good sign. I would imagine that some downtime is unavoidable during the time they work on the server setup while it's live.
I have never had any problem with MobileMe. It has always worked, and the downtime was not inconvenient. I did have a problem that MobileMe would pretend to sync iCal on my iMac, but nothing was changed. Then I discovered it was my own fault. I had accidentally put an extended attribute (group:everyone deny delete) on the files in my library folder. That was enough to prevent the sync. I removed it, and MobileMe was instantly able to sync.
Incidentally, the web hosting company's guarantee doesn't mean that I have less than four minutes of downtime a month. About once a year it goes haywire, and I lose a big chunk of a day. Computers don't need rests, but occasionally they take a nap anyway.
I have never had any problem with MobileMe. It has always worked, and the downtime was not inconvenient. I did have a problem that MobileMe would pretend to sync iCal on my iMac, but nothing was changed. Then I discovered it was my own fault. I had accidentally put an extended attribute (group:everyone deny delete) on the files in my library folder. That was enough to prevent the sync. I removed it, and MobileMe was instantly able to sync.
Incidentally, the web hosting company's guarantee doesn't mean that I have less than four minutes of downtime a month. About once a year it goes haywire, and I lose a big chunk of a day. Computers don't need rests, but occasionally they take a nap anyway.
Ya, it got me too...
Bummer.... I use MobileMe for my web hosting and email. I don't synch much, but it is starting to bother me that this outage situation is seemingly getting out of hand.
My older bro is on the other extreme. He is one of the 1% and is completely frustrated. I hope they get their stuff in one sock soon.
Bummer.... I use MobileMe for my web hosting and email. I don't synch much, but it is starting to bother me that this outage situation is seemingly getting out of hand.
My older bro is on the other extreme. He is one of the 1% and is completely frustrated. I hope they get their stuff in one sock soon.
Updating a website with an entirely new website deployment should take on the order of minutes, not hours, and you perform them at the dead of night when you have systems that tens of thousands of people use and pay for.
in the enterprise - it's generally expressed in the number of consecutive 9's .. hence 1 hour outage for a year represents 99.99988% uptime or five 9's .. apple's having a hard time with one 9 over the period of about a month
that does not bode well for any business .. (free to the consumer included) .. there are ways to do 100% uptime (seamless failover systems), but apple really doesn't play that well in the high availability or enterprise market
Business grade systems usually have uptime far higher than what you specify. 99.99 would be a low-end business, 99.999-99.9999 would be in the realm of most mission-critical business systems for fortune 500 companies, and 99.99999 is achieved by many very high-end systems used at very large companies.
MobileMe should probably be in the 2-3 nines range, which is 1/100 to 1/1000 of the downtime that you suggest is normal for business-grade systems, and much lower than their actual downtime.
The fact that people are being fired or demoted over this implies that Apple realizes the business threat of a reputation for instability. I'm sure many small business owners (independent contractors, etc.) will be looking at the iphone/mobile me combo as a cheaper alternative to a full blown exchange server set up; but I don't think that they will tolerate a service that is down at crucial hours of the day when they could be closing business deals.
Are you people idiots? Nobody calculates SLAs in 2 week timeframes. I've always seen SLAs expressed in annual uptime. Hitting Apple at their weakest with this voodoo math is retarded.
Anyone familiar with how IT actually works knows that the more 9's you want, the more you pay. Period. You people need to chill out -- Apple will not maintain "96% uptime" over a more reasonable sample of time.
Anyone familiar with how IT actually works knows that the more 9's you want, the more you pay. Period. You people need to chill out -- Apple will not maintain "96% uptime" over a more reasonable sample of time.
MobileMe is likely running on Unix systems. Unix systems (and I'm assuming that they aren't running OS X Server, because that would be a very dumb move on Apple's part) don't fall within the patch + reboot cycle that Windows and OS X does.
Moreover, you build these server infrastructures in clusters/pools that are not tethered to data. The vast majority of maintenance can be performed by pulling machines out of the pool one by one and applying updates. For machines that are tethered to data (e.g. SAN attached disks), you fail over to a spare that has the appropriate disks presented to it.
This isn't the 90s anymore, you don't need to plan for downtime for the vast majority of maintenance tasks. Downtime usually occurs when there are hardware/network failures and no redundancy (which is also inexcusable for Apple), or somebody goofs. This is why most serious hosting providers can promise 99% uptime, and mean it.
To be honest, a professional website doesn't tolerate any downtime for software patches.
MobileMe is hosted by an array of servers sitting behind a load distribution proxy. During upgrades, the proxy will be configured to avoid some percentage of the servers. Those servers will then be upgraded and tested. Then the proxy will be flipped to direct all traffic to the upgraded servers and none to the servers running the older version. Then they'll upgrade those servers and bring them all back online with the proxy.
Zero down time.
Glad I'm not using it
Just switched to gmail a few weeks ago, so far no downtime, everything syncs great with Mail, and I can get to gmail online from anywhere with no issues, and I pay $0. For once I must say Apple has really dropped the ball, they can't win em all.
Just switched to gmail a few weeks ago, so far no downtime, everything syncs great with Mail, and I can get to gmail online from anywhere with no issues, and I pay $0. For once I must say Apple has really dropped the ball, they can't win em all.
I haven't been having the serious downtime that others have been having but the service has definitely been a little flaky, even now.
My iPhone doesn't always receive the push emails when they come in, then suddenly gets a big bunch in one go. Other times they push fine. I have not had these problems with contacts and calendars though, which generally update automatically.
The web interface is definitely way too slow, and in fact generally crashes FireFox on my work PC (although soon we will be getting Outlook/IE).
It's slightly annoying that for people like me who upgraded from .mac (no choice there), these problems have emerged but, like Walt Mossberg says, I think the service will one day be great once this has all been ironed out.
That said, I think that Apple is going to be losing customers fast unless it gets all these things fixed very very quickly.
My iPhone doesn't always receive the push emails when they come in, then suddenly gets a big bunch in one go. Other times they push fine. I have not had these problems with contacts and calendars though, which generally update automatically.
The web interface is definitely way too slow, and in fact generally crashes FireFox on my work PC (although soon we will be getting Outlook/IE).
It's slightly annoying that for people like me who upgraded from .mac (no choice there), these problems have emerged but, like Walt Mossberg says, I think the service will one day be great once this has all been ironed out.
That said, I think that Apple is going to be losing customers fast unless it gets all these things fixed very very quickly.
Gmail's outage yesterday was documented just about everywhere. Here are a couple for you:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210002460
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/08/gmail-outage-st.html
I was having quite an important conversation yesterday afternoon over gmail... I'd have noticed if there was an issue. The downtime hasn't been zero (it took a couple of days for my account to allow sending from my domain properly) but it's been *way* better than either mobileme or .mac.
Those links say the website went down.. I don't think I'd notice if they deleted it altogether - never used it.
Where I work, with that kind of availability numbers, the dev and deployment teams would be out on the streets in virtually no time.
Boy - that's scary. Apple should may be farm out the MobileMe service development / hosting to the smarter people at Google before MobileMe becomes Hotmail or Windows Live - one in every 2 request errors out.
Boy - that's scary. Apple should may be farm out the MobileMe service development / hosting to the smarter people at Google before MobileMe becomes Hotmail or Windows Live - one in every 2 request errors out.
It sounds like MobileMe's launch was a real mess, but .Mac wasn't exactly the most reliable as far as uptime was concerned... I don't get why anyone would expect a brand new service to be more reliable right off the bat...
THAT SAID -- what do you people use MobileMe for?! I use it to check my email, keep my bookmarks sync'd, and to sync contacts... if I had to wait 4 hours to access any of that info, I'd pull out my phone or my computer and use the local copy, or do without, or use my memory. I can't imagine the situation where 4 hours of downtime would cause me undue problems...
Then again, maybe I just have low standards
THAT SAID -- what do you people use MobileMe for?! I use it to check my email, keep my bookmarks sync'd, and to sync contacts... if I had to wait 4 hours to access any of that info, I'd pull out my phone or my computer and use the local copy, or do without, or use my memory. I can't imagine the situation where 4 hours of downtime would cause me undue problems...
Then again, maybe I just have low standards
THAT SAID -- what do you people use MobileMe for?! I use it to check my email, keep my bookmarks sync'd, and to sync contacts... if I had to wait 4 hours to access any of that info, I'd pull out my phone or my computer and use the local copy, or do without, or use my memory. I can't imagine the situation where 4 hours of downtime would cause me undue problems...
Then again, maybe I just have low standards
Possibly
Generally when something hits my inbox there's some reason for it (the boring stuff is filtered to folders long before it needs to bother me). Sometimes it's my boss trying to get me urgently to deal with an issue with our servers or to answer a question from a customer (who are on 2 hour response contracts) - a 4 hour delay on either of those could be costly. In fact the only time he'd email me out of hours direct to my home email is in the case of something fairly urgent - the noncritical stuff can stick to the office email.
It goes without saying I'd sell the iphone rather than put the office email on it..
Code:
Uptime Time lost in a year
96% 14.6 days
98% 7.3 days
99.0% 3.7 days
99.9% 8 hours
99.99% 1 hour
99.999% 5 minutes
Despite your casual assertion, I can't recall my .mac mail being down during working hours when I need it most. Having it down and out yesterday for the majority of the workday makes it an official handful of times since the MobileMe rollout. My experience with .mac vs. MobileMe so far? Yes, .mac was more reliable.