The power of Google’s ability to perform fast and accurate Web searches comes in large part from the its distributed nature—using a geographically dispersed network of computing power to deliver results to users quickly. Distributed systems like Google’s have another advantage, too: they inherently protect against any single point of failure since if equipment in one location goes down the slack can be picked up somewhere else.
In a Thursday post, ZDNet MobileTech blogger Eric Everson suggested that, in light of two major outages within a year, RIM might want to consider a more distributed type of architecture to provide service for its BlackBerry devices, rather than feeding everything through a centralized system.
Everson quoted a Canadian Press report as pointing out that, “The concentration of RIM's BlackBerry service at a single network operation centre in the Ontario city of Waterloo, through which traffic such as e-mails are routed, exacerbates such problems and leaves it open to more crashes.”
Everson added in his post, “If at a network level everything is routed through a bottleneck configuration it likely doesn’t take the Founder of MyMobiSafe.com to point out that there may be some mobile security issues users should consider.”
In other words, there is power in numbers and RIM might do well to consider adopting a distributed network architecture to avoid such a major outage again in the future.
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