ZDnet has published an amazing webcast on Google mail that reveals many of the "behind the scenes" attributes that help make Google mail a killer cloud service.  Some of the highlights include explanations of how Google structures and architects their applications for performance and fault tolerance.  Numbers like "hundreds of thousands of servers" and "dozens of datacenters" are used throughout.   Even having known a little bit about the scale of their operations, some of their "tricks" are just incredible.  For example, did you know that Google actually puts POPs (points of presence) into ISPs all over the globe to ensure that their users can access Google applications via Googles "reliable network" instead of the presumably unreliable internet service provided by the ISPs themselves?  How about the ability to "instantly repurpose" application servers to meet demand?  

As announced last year by Arbor Networks, Google traffic accounts for over 6.4% of all Internet traffic, making it the 2nd largest carrier in the world.   The scale of their operation is beyond impressive.  

With all these impressive speeds, feeds, and statistics, what really caught my eye (ear?) were several statements on reliability.  Google Apps for Business offers an SLA for their customers that provides for 3-nines (99.9% uptime).  So far, their measured reliability has been a whopping 99.984%!   The Radicati Group, a technology market research company, has published in a recent study that on-premises email systems (such as Exchange solutions hosted by the IT department) average just over 3.8 hours of downtime per month (a bit better than 2 nines, much worse than 3 nines).  It was also mentioned that Google has no scheduled maintenance windows.  All maintenance, updates, and upgrades are done while the system is live and available for use.  Incredible!  If only Microsoft would learn from Google...

If the cost advantages for Google mail over in-house solutions were not enough to entice corporate email to migrate to the Cloud, perhaps cost along with reliability and security will.  I believe there's currently no better solution available anywhere. 

The webcast can be found here.  Note: ZDnet will make you register (for free) and log in to see the video...it's worth it!