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Archive for November 3rd, 2008

Google Offers SLA for Premier Apps

In a wake of Gmail outages and buggy Apps that drew the ire of its loyal user base, Google on Thursday announced a service level agreement (SLA) for the Premier Edition of Google Apps.Google’s premium online productivity and collaboration suite now comes with a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Sites and Google Talk.

Through its internal research, Google determined Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time for the past year, despite the negative headlines in August 2008. Even if you factor in the August outage, Google said there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of Gmail downtime per month over the last year. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds at a time.

“A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry,” Matthew Glotzbach, a product management director at Google Enterprise, wrote in the company blog. “And for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, we have extended service level agreement credits to them.”

Click here to read the rest of my story on NewsFactor.

November 3rd, 2008

Sony, HP, Dell, Toshiba Recall ‘Firecracker’ Laptop BatteriesSony, HP, Dell, Toshiba Recall ‘Firecracker’ Laptop Batteries

Sony and three major PC makers are recalling 100,000 laptop batteries in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.Lithium-Ion batteries used in about 35,000 Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Dell notebook computers — as well as an additional 65,000 units sold worldwide — are defective. Specifically, these Lithium-Ion batteries can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to consumers.

As of Oct. 30, there have been 19 reports of the batteries overheating, including 17 reports of flames and fire. Ten of those battery failures resulted in minor property damage, and two consumers experienced minor burns.

“This is not a huge recall seeing as there were millions before from Sony’s last round,” said Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates. “But we’ve already seen way more instances of flames and property damage than there was in the last big battery recall.”

Click here to read the rest of my story on NewsFactor.

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