New Video of Apple's Enormous iDataCenter 182
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? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
What will go in it?-RDF. (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
500k square feet is not that big (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:vacation Louisiana (Score:1, Insightful)
I had no idea top500 was about datacenters... I thought they were about raw-processing power, not storage. Or are they?
Re:500k square feet is not that big (Score:2, Insightful)
...this is probably a billion dollar investment for Apple.
Is that why the 11-inch Macbook Air costs $1000?
Re:Hey, (Score:2, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:What OS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hey, (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:The article seems to say.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The article seems to say.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, offering optional services that people will find compelling enough to voluntarily pay for. What an evil manipulative bastard!
Re:500k square feet is not that big (Score:3, Insightful)
"It costs $1000 because they had to custom-design a lot of internal parts and do stuff to make everything fit."
Nope. It costs $1000 because they know that not only their customers will pay for it but that their customers even *want* to pay for it (their marketing people has been working for long years in order for that to happen).
Hint: you never base your price tag on your building costs but on what your customer is willing to pay.
Re:500k square feet is not that big (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, say you're a commodity PC vendor. You buy motherboards from Asus, hard drives from Seagate, etc. Buying a flash SATA in an enclosure, especially if you're buying in bulk for your production, is totally doable and not going to be too expensive. Designing your own motherboard so that the flash is integrated into it (of course, making it entirely non-upgradable in a much more serious way than complaints about batteries) is going to cost money, etc. My point was that these aren't just off-the-shelf parts that you're paying to have pre-assembled, they did actually do some work to make this thing.
Re:Hey, (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:500k square feet is not that big (Score:1, Insightful)
That's right. That's why I'm so tired of the Apple bashing. You don't have to like them, you can even hate them, but it makes you (not *you*) look ignorant to deny that Apple knows what the hell they're doing. Someday Apple will buy Dell, just for kicks. It would be like shopping for a discounted DVD at Walmart. They're a damned savvy company. (By the by, I haven't used an Apple computer since a Gossamer PPC).
Re:What will go in it?-RDF. (Score:1, Insightful)
What I find ironic is that anyone who proposes import tariffs is sneered at as being a jingoistic isolationist, while if one tries to do business in China, it has to be with a Chinese business owning 51% of the venture. In Germany, a foreign company cannot own land; only citizens of the FRG can.