July 11, 2008 marked Apple’s long-awaited release for iPhone hipsters and wannabes…the new iPhone 3G. It’s finally here where surfing time on EDGE will hopefully be few and far between. Being able to finally pick up those new ear buds you’ve been i-balling or downloading a few cool apps at the new App Store is a big plus too…we can talk about the so-called “GPS” later. If you saw the lines that started the night before or were one of the diehards that were in line, you knew the anticipation was high, almost as much as the first release last year.
So you finally get in the store where you’re able to get your reward. You go to pick up your new 3G iPhone only to find out that you need to activate the phone in the store before you leave. As you go through the activation motions, you’ve already figured out the first 5 people you’re going to text/call – but wait, after experiencing failed attempts at activating your new crown jewel, you hear from the store that there’s some glitch with the activation process and the service is down (!!!). So you wait…”It’s back up again…” Now it’s down again. Now they tell you to that you can activate your phone when you get home. While you’ve been waiting, AT&T already switched your number from your old phone to your new 3G iPhone so you’re starting to feel a bit vulnerable because you have no service in the meantime! (There are help groups for this…) So you get home and cradle up your new baby and again you wait…and wait, and wait…and finally after what seemed to be an eternity, an activation signal! YES, IT’S ALIVE!!!
Could this embarrassing delay in activating your phone have been avoided? Most definitely. Many high-transactional service carriers and application companies that have very “peaky” user loads run into this type of situation where an onslaught of simultaneous users brings the application platform down to its knees and, when it happens, it’s critical. Would having SSDs in place for this activation service have made a positive difference for Apple and AT&T for their 3G iPhone release? ABSOLUTELY!
Having been involved with various 3G architecture design teams for MVAS providers and carriers around the world, I’ve helped to address these very same types of scenarios in services that require real-time user responses like OTA activation, Identity Management and Real-Time Billing services down to the basic SMS text services. Implementing SSDs for the backend not only provides the quickest persistent service times to data when updating user’s records, but also provides an enormous amount of additional headroom to the platform by eliminating the excessive queuing, locking and blocking instances of database tables and records created by using slow HDD storage. Only DRAM SSDs can provide quick enough service times to data, enabling applications that require persistent storage to remain within required millisecond SLA levels.
Often complex distributed server environments are implemented to “try” addressing these strict SLA requirements, only to find out that heavy reliance on multiple proxy and application servers full of memory tied to a pile of drives in a gluttonous RAID array didn’t cut the mustard. Had Apple and AT&T implemented a more efficient architecture utilizing SSD technology at Tier0, problems like the one experienced last week and last year would have been mitigated or eliminated. Can we say “iSSD”?
In the end, everybody needs their “i’s” checked so problems like this can be avoided in the future but, of course, hindsight even in IT, is 20/20…
