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Windows 7 RC Rush Crashes MSDN, TechNet Pages
CWmike writes "Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) and TechNet paid subscribers were supposed to find the 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows 7 RC available for download today. But in a snafu reminiscent of the problems Microsoft had in January when it tried to launch Windows 7 Beta, the download pages for the release candidate were inaccessible, despite numerous attempts over an hour-long span up until about noon Eastern. TechNet and MSDN subscribers were not happy. 'Man, this stinks,' said a user identified as Lyle Pratt, on a TechNet message forum at 10 a.m. ET. 'I can't believe we can still bring MSDN to its knees!' said John Butler, a Microsoft partner. 'Surely, they should be able to deal with this? Not a good advert for Microsoft.' The Windows 7 RC is slated to be available for public download next Tuesday, May 5. Meanwhile, Microsoft said today that the RC would operate until June 2010, for 13 months of free use — a significantly longer time than it did with Vista's previews."
They could use the same (or similar) system which Apple uses for OS X updates, HD Movie Downloads, Music Distribution and recently 1 billion hit App Store. It is Akamai/Edgesuite. Apple uses their own XServe for regular, dynamic content and offloads to Akamai (EdgeSuite) for big files. Nobody questions them for that decision as it is the logical thing to do. Just imagine the load of distributing 1 billion downloads in a completely random manner. It is just "app store". Now add HD Movies, World's most popular music store offering lossless files etc.
Of course, we all know the OS such large content distributors run. Let me write straight, they don't want to be in position of using Unix based hosting from third party to distribute their all new cool Windows 7 beta and more importantly, Windows server.
We see what happens though :)