The Scale of the Universe
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Speaking at the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, European Director of Google’s online sales John Herlihy said that Google is mostly oriented towards mobile devices, claiming they’ll become more important than desktop PCs.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” he said.

True, with Android and Nexus One Google has shown a commitment to extend its dominance from the online world to the mobile world. But will desktop PCs really become irrelevant? Depends on how you look at it. Google isn’t really interested in how we edit our photos; it’s interested in where we store them, and increasingly, we do that at a place is a part of their domain — the cloud.

And if your data moves to the cloud, and most of your daily online activities are done on devices such as the Nexus One and the iPad, where simple, widget-style applications cater to your precise needs, then yes, desktop PCs as we know them now will become a lot less important. On the other hand, not many users are ready to ditch the desktop just yet; we’ll see if it all pans out according to Google’s plans.

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In a blog post today, Google essentially reminds its enterprise customers that Google Apps provides an alternative to expensive, complex solutions as far as data disaster recovery goes.

Synchronous replication is a system that Google Apps uses to store customer’s info in two data centers at once, so that if one data center fails, Google says it nearly instantly transfers data over to the other one that’s also been reflecting the actions taken by the customer all along.

On the practical side this means that thanks to the cloud-based storage solution, Google customers won’t lose any data in a data center failure. Just as crucially, they are theoretically back up and running straight away — although the online giant does acknowledge that no backup solution is perfect.

This synchronous replication is applied to the entire Apps suite as well as Gmail (Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites), with the sales angle being enterprise-class back-up for all at a much lower cost than if companies were to provide or contract separately for their own data redundancy systems.

Google, ever keen to push its Apps suite to new corporate clients of all sizes, estimates that this kind of back up could cost up to $500 for 25GB of data from other providers, but says it can bundle it in because it’s already running large, fast data centers.

This is essentially Google reminding enterprise customers (and potential customers) about one of the significant benefits of cloud computing over traditional in-house server farm data storage. How does your business handle data backup and redundancy issues? Do you think cloud computing is the ideal solution to hardware failure?