Say What? iCloud Powered By Microsoft, Amazon
June 15, 2011
Here’s something you won’t be reading in Apple’s iCloud promotional material; the cloud service relies on products from Microsoft and Amazon. In fact, for the time being anyway, it looks like Apple isn’t even using its North Carolina data center to backup data, according to ZDNet.
We’ve heard a lot about Apple’s new $500 million North Carolina data center and assumed it would power iCloud. However, at least during its beta, iCloud isn’t actually storing anything. Rather, it simply manages links to upload content.
Microsoft’s Azure product and Amazon Web Services are handling the service’s actual storage capability.
According to ZDNet, however, this is likely temporary:
Apple’s iCloud is still in beta, and Apple is just in the process of turning on its much-touted $500 million North Carolina data center. Apple’s datacenter, as my ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan noted, is running a combination of Mac OS X, IBM/AIX, Sun/Solaris, and Linux systems. Maybe Apple’s seeming reliance on Azure and AWS — in whatever capacity they’re actually being used — is temporary. It’s still interesting, though. (And probably something the Softies wish they could use in an official case study.)Even if Apple's reliance on two of its main competitors for iCloud is temporary, it is an interesting story nonetheless. Don't you think? What do you think? Leave your comments below.
