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New Video of Apple's Enormous iDataCenter
1sockchuck writes "A new aerial video provides a rare look at Apple's new data center in North Carolina, which is expected to begin operations as soon as this week. It reveals the scale of the facility, which at 500,000 square feet will be among the world's largest data centers. The video, shot by a North Carolina real estate agent, also shows additional site preparation work that could support rumors that Apple plans to build another huge data center at the site." This is what drone cameras are for.
Rare aerial video? Is there a square meter of the Earth's surface that hasn't been flown over and photographed in the last month?
So Apple's building a datacenter. Good for them; it'll join all their other datacenters, Apple and otherwise, around the world
. News, for nerds or otherwise, this isn't.
Actually that would be a rather good question and at least an opportunity for Apple to gain more enterprise experience not to mention "eating one's own dog food".
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Large, but not that large. Most US telecoms hubs have several centers at the 500K SF level. Google has more than a dozen data centers with ~ 100,000 square feet each.
With buildout costs ranging from ~ $ 1000 / SF to a rumored 3 times that for Google, this is probably a billion dollar investment for Apple.
I had no idea top500 was about datacenters... I thought they were about raw-processing power, not storage. Or are they?
Because my state legislature bent over and asked for apples two-inch dick. The tax incentives they gave for the damn thing are rediculous.
Is it just me, or does the idea of storing data on the equipment(property) of other people bother anyone else?
One question about all of this keeps coming to mind. At what point does that data become theirs, and not mine?
Until someone answers that question to MY satisfaction, I'll stick with my clunky, old HDs. At present, cloud-computing appears to me to be nothing more then a move to further monetize our own data by inserting a middleman between us and said data.
Apple ran solaris for years and then eventually moved to OS X, when they did that some of there employees at mac world refered to eating there own dog food. OS X is BSD, and server can run without a UI, They probably will run the whole thing on OSX, mind you they will probably be optimizing the stack.
Data centers don't really create jobs. Estimates are at like 100 tops.
Yeah it gave the building contractors something to do, but it would have been better spent towards our shoddy roads.
Do iPads/Phones/Fish have the bandwidth to stream high-quality music anyway?
802.11n isn't high bandwidth?
I remember something about the iPad not getting a great wireless signal.
iPads get great wireless reception and they get poor wireless reception, just like pretty much anything wireless. Somebody who got poor wireless reception posted about it and you mistook that for a universally applicable anecdote.
This will give them control over your entire media collection.
No it won't. But that does fit the present Slashdot narrative regarding Apple.
In an instant they could wipe it from existence or do whatever they want with it.
Including the backup copy in my physical possession? And there's a huge difference between "could" and "would". If Apple ever did this deliberately, that would instantly decimate their user base as users leave that service in droves. Even if they did it accidentally, it would have a huge negative impact. I think it's fair to say Apple won't do something like that deliberately, and with a billion dollar datacenter and their technological skills, they should be able to keep from doing this accidentally as well.
You could promote the exact same fear about hosting photos on sites like Flickr and Picasa, or files on dropbox, etc. But you won't because it's a silly concern that's easily protected against. But because this is Apple, well shit, "worst case scenario" is synonymous with "most likely scenario" as far as many of the posters here are concerned!
I don't have any Apple devices, but if I did, I know that I would not upload my high-quality, offline available music to a server where it will most probably be re-encoded at a lower bitrate so they can stream it back to me.
802.11n is fast enough to stream HD video. Even a completely non-compressed surround sound 24-bit 192kHz would have no problem being streamed over 802.11g. Since you likely don't have your music in that format, let's assume by "high quality" you mean FLAC. Apple's lossless codec (ALAC) is similar. So, pretending for a moment you are talking about ALAC-encoded music, that's only about 700kb/s. You can even stream that over 3G. And if it's the more likely scenario of being 256k AAC or 128-256k MP3?
Maybe it'll be optional, but from what I've seen of Apple they will force their users to make use of it.
How the fuck do you think they will accomplish that? Do you think they will remove local storage of music from iPhones/iPods/iPads? Do you think they will stop allowing local storage in iTunes? If something like this comes to pass, it will be in addition to how the devices already work, and people who aren't all "Steve Jobs is an evil mastermind hell-bent on fascist world domination" will fucking love it.
Yeah, offering optional services that people will find compelling enough to voluntarily pay for. What an evil manipulative bastard!
It was Apple's after-tax money to spend as they wished, not the local, state, or federal governments'. Without a major building there, Apple couldn't care less about the roads in that area. Now that they have a presence, governments get money from taxing datacentre workers salaries, the property, and operations (power consumption, bandwidth, capital costs, etc), as well as the income from these building contractors.
If major roads are that shoddy, the problem is with the government(s), and/or the people who vote for them. Either taxes are too low, or the people/government actually don't care enough about the condition of the roads.