Racks of servers that populate Apple’s $1 billion data center in Maiden, North Carolina. (credit: Image courtesy of Apple Inc.)
A mid-2016 security incident led to Apple purging its data centers of servers built by Supermicro, including returning recently purchased systems, according to a report by The Information. Malware-infected firmware was reportedly detected in an internal development environment for Apple’s App Store, as well as some production servers handling queries through Apple’s Siri service.
An Apple spokesperson denied there was a security incident. However, Supermicro’s senior vice-president of technology,Tau Leng, told The Information that Apple had ended its relationship with Supermicro because of the compromised systems in the App Store development environment. Leng also confirmed Apple returned equipment that it had recently purchased. An anonymous source was cited as the source of the information regarding infected Siri servers.
Apple has used a variety of other companies’ server hardware—since the company got out of the server business itself and never used its own in datacenters—including servers from HP and storage from NetApp. A few years ago, Apple added Supermicro as a supplier for some of its development and data center computing infrastructure.