What's Up With Apple's Hosting Infrastructure?

Om Malik has an interesting post about Apple’s recent problems with its MobileMe hosting service and what they may indicate about the sophistication of Apple’s data center operations:

One of my sources opined that Apple clearly wasn’t too savvy about all the progress made in infrastructure over the past few years. If this insinuation is indeed true, then there is no way Apple can get over its current spate of problems. It needs a crash course in infrastructure and Internet services. Apple’s problem is that it doesn’t seem to have recognized the fact that it’s in the business of network-enabled hardware.

Om has more details. Apple is no stranger to major traffic events, hosting videos of movie trailers and MacWorld keynotes. But it has also been a big user of content delivery networks, especially Akamai. If Om’s sources are correct, perhaps the reliance on CDNs for scalability left Apple unprepared for some of the challenges that rose during the MobileMe launch.

Apple bought a former MCI/WorldCom data center in Newark, Calif for about $50 million back in 2006. (Link via Dave Ohara).

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.