Microsoft’s Data Robustness
January 11, 2009
The “we may go out of business” Seattlepi.com Web site ran a story with the cruel title “Microsoft’s Servers Overloaded by Interest in Windows 7.” You can read this sort of weird headline and its accompanying story here. The story makes clear that Microsoft’s investments in its data centers was not up to the load imposed by the faithful downloading Windows 7.
The misstep was described as a “borkfest” by Lifehacker here. This goose isn’t sure what a borkfest is, but he can make a guess. Gina Trapani’s article nails the problem. She wrote:
If lack of infrastructure to handle an insane traffic spike over a few hours was truly the problem (even though these were conditions Microsoft created), there are lots of alternatives they could’ve used that would have kept their servers up. In fact, users have been happily downloading and distributing the Windows 7 beta build 7000 now for weeks using an efficient file-sharing protocol called BitTorrent.
When the GOOG streamed its live concert test last year, the Googlers tapped Akamai. Did Microsoft use its own content delivery network? Did Microsoft contract out the job? Whoever handled the job may want to check out another line of work in my opinion. Seattlepi.com quotes a Microsoft Web log. I noted this sentence: “We are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta.” Good idea.
Stephen Arnold, January 11, 2009
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