Apple’s MobileMe Launch Problems Might Be Just the Beginning

The MobileMe launch was a massive flusteruck–even Steve said so. Our long national nightmare is over though, right? Well, Om is reporting that their whole net infrastructure is a few years behind where it should be, and if it’s as bad as he’s heard, “then there is no way Apple can get over its current spate of problems.”

Here’s his bullet point list of Apple’s infrastructure issues:

•There is no-unified IT plan vis-a-vis applications; each has their own set of servers, IT practices and release scenarios.
•Developers do testing, load testing and infrastructure planning, all of which is implemented by someone else.
•There’s no unified monitoring system.
•They use Oracle on Sun servers for the databases and everything has its own SAN storage. They do not use active Oracle RAC; it is all single-instance, on one box, with a secondary failover.
•Apparently they are putting web servers and app servers on the same machines, which causes performance problems.

Whether Apple likes it or not, it is in the networking business now. It’s part of the package, and if they’re gonna promise stuff will “just work,” it needs to from every angle, especially the ones that should be invisible to the consumer (like connectivity). We hope MobileMe’s problems aren’t a sign of things to come. Maybe Google could teach them a thing or two. [GigaOM]