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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.
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.
"The *Fully Operational* iDataCenter", even though it appears half-built. I'm sure I heard someone use a phrase like that before, can't think where...
How can that be the apple datacenter !
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
Because 1) Apple's already got a massive data center here, and 2) it's a good idea to put redundant data centers on opposite sides of the country.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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!
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.
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.
Apple sells hardware. All of this is non-revenue generating investment, it's just a way to consume profits.
No, but it's a way to create future profits by making their hardware more appealing through cloud services the way the App Store has made iPhones more appealing to consumers.
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.
Sigh, no to both posters, OS X is neither Mach nor BSD. It is built on XNU, a hybrid kernel built on Mach, with BSD bits to provide the Unix process model, POSIX API, the network stack, file systems, and some other goodies. The BSD bits were adapted from FreeBSD with significant modifications. There is also something called I/O Kit to provide drivers, and this part is unique to OS X.
XNU has been greatly developed from the original created by NeXTSTEP. The Mach part has been changed from Mach 2.5 to Mach 3.0, the BSD part has been changed from 4.3BSD to FreeBSD as a base, and Driver Kit has become I/O Kit.
I'm pretty sure Apple has noticed a problem that many other people have. If you have several devices (iPhone, iPad, iMac, lets say), and a large collection of data (documents, music, videos, etc.) keeping all this stuff in sync is a royal pain in the arse. It's also damn annoying having to choose what to put on you portable devices. As a hardware manufacturer that want to sell you a stack of devices, Apple has a huge interest in make the management of your data between these devices seamless. Apple's efforts in this direction have been a bit fumbling so far. Manual syncing's not great (Steve Jobs actually mentioned this when he was launching the new Apple TV), and MobileMe is clearly inadequate.
I suspect Apple's heading to a stream anything you have to any iDevice you have any time you have a network connection. They need to to keep their multi-device hardware business competitive. To do this, they need massive data storage and streaming capabilities.
All seems pretty obvious to me.
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. :-)
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