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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.
I just hope no one holds the database wrong.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Why does the video have sound?
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.
Will they load it up with xserve?
I wonder if Apple is the biggest customer for Xserves?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's full of Apples.
How can that be the apple datacenter !
What OS will their servers run?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Steve Jobs: [overheard on an iphone in a coffee shop somewhere in Cupertino] ...As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the streaming power of this fully STACKED and OPERATIONAL data center!
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?
Sounds like the name of a line of Apple branded external hard drives. "You really should buy an iDataCenter drive to backup your files on your new MacBook - only an extra $300 for a 1 TB iDataCenter drive!"
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I mean a whiter shade of gray.
How come they didn't build it in California? Hm.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Some day all the processing power and storage in that place will fit on something you can hold in your hand. Let's hear from the /. futurist nerds why this will/will not be the case.
iCaramba!
I remember the Death Star being half built and I quote the Emperor "Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!"
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.
I'm trying to find it on Google maps but can't. Does anyone have coordinates for where this actually is?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I'm sure they've thought of this, but I really hope that the river next to it doesn't flood ....
(Rummages through FEMA's awful web site for flood maps) Well, that's interesting. Apple's probably OK, as the 1% flood line doesn't appear to cover their site. However, there's an interesting line on the map called, "limit of study", that appears to end before the site... Assuming that I have the right location, google maps is here, and here is FEMA's flood map (note: FEMA's link was working earlier, but now appears to be broken -- I hope I got the link right).
Not much different than the first video".
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!
"In an instant they could wipe it from existence or do whatever they want with it."
So you're saying it's like Android then?
the only customer for Xserves?
Let's face it... Apple has proved to best cost effective in the recent years, so they'll probably buy cheap dell hardware and assemble them on a Linux grid.
Nah, it's just styling. Ten years ago, Apple would have built six little ones in rainbow colors; five years before that it would have been matte black, and five years before *that* they'd have painted it beige.
Apple sells hardware. All of this is non-revenue generating investment, it's just a way to consume profits.
I had no idea top500 was about datacenters...
You're right, it's not. It's about supercomputers. The first one on the Top 500 list I could find information on regarding area was #4, Kraken. It's only 2,000 square feet. OP just needed an excuse to put down the iPad, lest he risk loosing the "leet" 3's in his his username.
If Apple ever wants to replace the cable and satellite companies for TV shows and movies, they're going to need a shitload of datacenters and bandwidth.
If you still believe the AppleTV is a "hobby" that is not going anywhere, then why would they have made a second version tailored for streaming?
I know a Lieutenant Commander from Starfleet that would disagree with you.
I guess they don't put the same effort into their data centers as they do into their Apple stores, at least concerning the outside. And why did they build it so wide instead of up?
The writer of the original article and many posters look like they aren't aware of the next release of OS X. This will be a perfect justification for the 30% cut on the App Store. Perhaps they will even offer a service similar to SourceForge to sweeten the deal. With this capacity, they can afford to do it.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
can it play quake?
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
All this speculation about iThis and iThat is premature - this could be nothing more than a new foray into the new market known as cloud computing. Big bets suggest there is money to be made, though I'm not sure anyone has figured out the market enough yet to know how to make it. The very young cloud computing space is already crowded with the likes of Amazon, Intuit, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, and the list goes on. So it looks like here comes one more in Apple for the giant cage match. Like a lot of new areas of competition it will be interesting to see who buys which operation, which ones fail, and who is left standing at the end.
Mayday! Mayday! I think I'm flying into a mountain! Tell my wife I lo...
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
have you or have you not read how apple lawyers keep suing people around australia for using the letter "i" in any kind of i.t. brand, and in u.s. the companies that use 'pod'.
either you havent, or the system again allowed a witless fanboi to get mod points.
getting downmodded isnt a problem. the zealotry is.
Read radical news here
It's the iNormous Datacenter. It's magic.
Why do I have this feeling that another company may use part of the storage at this data center in exchange for prominent icon placement by Apple on the Apple TV? I can see Netflix doing this very thing.
Supercomputers reside in data centers, but a small percentage of data centers house supercomputers.
Don't worry, your vain attempt to sound superior to all things Apple didn't shine through AT ALL.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Fortunately we have saints such as yourself, who do everything for free and only exist to serve humanity. Hopefully it's enough to balance out the evil of Apple who like to get paid for their hard work (selfish bastards!!).
I'm just amazed that it hasn't got nice rounded corners. How could Steve allow this?
No left turn unstoned.
The OP asked "Is there a square meter of the Earth's surface that hasn't been flown over and photographed in the last month?"
The answer is NO, by several sources, down to a resolution of less than 3 inches.
Just because you don't have access to it because you can't find better than KH-11 imagery doesn't mean that the imagery doesn't exist.
I have seen embarrassing photos of infamous people sunning themselves, from 490 miles away. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Hardware can come from anywhere, specially the consumer devices which are extremely price sensitive, but you can't/don't want to/ export consumer data.
Would you store all those credit card numbers and transaction records on foreign soil?
Would you store all of those apps, tunes, movies etc. on foreign soil?
Now imagine you live on foreign soil...
Look for Apple store roll-outs in other countries to be preceded by data warehouse expansion as Apple gets more and more involved with using the 'net for content distribution.
Apple will store statistical data for sales world-wide but will keep the financial and transaction data local to each jurisdiction.
Its a matter of accounting and accountability. You don't want to risk any merging or co-mingling of data.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There is a thing called a volume control.
In fact I have volume controls on my MacBook Pro AND on my speakers.
Wow, who'd have thought of it... Obviously, not you.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Ton vocabulaire te marque comme un Français où un Wallon. (J'ai étudié les jurons. :-)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I think most nerds would be concerned about your complete lack of understanding your own words.
"...MILLIONS of dollars!"
*The Security Council bursts out laughing, and the Defense Minister of India offers to end the crisis by pulling out his personal checkbook and writing a check out for the amount*
Your post was very informative, but I couldn't help but get a Dr Evil moment from your state's supposed infrastructure expenditure. My city spends as much on a single duck pond or a bike trail. Hopefully you meant to demand/say BILLIONS! Or, given the strength of the dollar, TRILLIONS!
Lies about crimes
Every patriot thinks their country produces the best quality. But after Mercedes brought one model line here and could not after years of trying match the quality they were getting in Germany, they decided not to do it again. And the quality of American cars, well, speaks for itself.
So I have the option of starting anew in a country with high salaries and a spotty quality record, or I can go to the factory in China that already makes the iPhone and iPad at very high quality with workers who do not expect to spend hours on Gmail and Slashdot *ahem* everyday. Guess which I'm going to choose? The tax rate has nothing to do with it.
Lies about crimes