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.
What will go in it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Will they load it up with xserve?
I wonder if Apple is the biggest customer for Xserves?
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".
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Maybe the located in North Carolina to get easy access to Red Hat? /ducks
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Re:What will go in it?-RDF. (Score:5, Informative)
Cheap TVA electricity.
Actually, they are located close to McGuire nuclear power plant [duke-energy.com] (owned by Duke Energy), and near 4 major hydroelectric dams on the Yadkin River that create High Rock Lake, Tuckertown, Badin Lake (Narrows) and Falls lake, which are managed/quazi-owned by Alcoa [alcoa.com]. Alcoa doesn't make aluminum here anymore, so they have power to sell, and usually do during peak time. There are also a number of coal and natural gas plants nearby. I live about 70 miles from the new data center, and was somewhat surprised that they put it in such a low density area, until I realized how much power capacity is nearby. TVA isn't really a factor in this part of the country, as I believe all the hydro power around here is privately owned.
Electricity usage in NC is way down, due to all the textile and furniture manufacturing moving to China and India, plus all the aluminum manufacturing is now gone. Those industries were typically BIG consumers of electricity. My understanding is that all the power plants in this region are running well below their peak output, so we literally have more than we know what to do with here. I would imagine that electricity is damn cheap for Apple to buy in bulk, which is a major portion of their expenses.
Also, it doesn't hurt that NC is located somewhat in the center of the eastern USA, and 2/3rds of the population lives east of the Mississippi river, so it is actually a good location, geographically. The rather new Dell plant near Winston-Salem was just shut down (moved to Mexico), and there has been rumors of Apple buying it for manufacturing as well. There are lots of good reasons that would make sense, since the state spent MILLIONS in new infrastructure to the plant just a few years ago, and the workforce around here is generally good with a manufacturing history, AND both UPS and FedEx have major hubs about 30 minutes away at GSO. Would love to see that happen, only because we need the jobs with over 10% unemployment here.
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As great as this would be, I'll believe it when I see it. I just can't imagine that an organization as big as Apple would be so forward thinking as recognizing that the cost of doing business overseas is often not realized immediately. Especially since those costs may never be realized by the people running the company -- a lot of the the price is paid
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It's called Externalities [wikipedia.org], and the negative externalities are what taxes are meant to compensate for, though imposing import tariffs to discourage off-shoring is considered bad form these days.
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I don't foresee Apple doing all their manufacturing in the USA, but perhaps similar to what Dell was doing: The "build your own" market. This applies only to computers, not their other devices, which will always be overseas. One of the weaknesses of Apple in the past has been being able to customize your computer system. While it is infinitely better now, you still need to be able to take the main components (made in China) and do the final assembly near your point of shipment. Having a facility in NC *
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With a lot of higher end products that have a good margin, a company is way more likely to build in the US or at least North America. The problem with building in the US isn't quality of employees or products, it is the overall cost. This is why cheap stuff with razor thin margins go overseas first, the stuff that you don't just sell 10,000 of them, but > 1 million. This is one of the reasons I am for lowering corporate taxes, to encourage more manufacturing, for at least mid and high end products.
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The only problem with such an analysis is that if you rely on sub-assemblies coming from China, how is the East Coast of the US supposed to be an advantage?
At a minimum, it's a trip through the Panama Canal or trans-shipment via rail from the West Coast. I suppose going around the Cape in Africa would be an option, too, but that seems even further.
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Time on the water is cheap compared to time over land, calculating cost per mile. We deal in a lot of stuff in ocean containers, and it is the overland portion of the trip that is expensive. Once it is on a truck, you need one truck and one driver for one container, instead of one vessel and 20 crew for hundreds of containers. And not all the parts come from China. Flying specialized parts from China to NC isn't much different than to NC either, when you are talking about that kind of volume.
HW can be made anywhere, DATA is secured locally. (Score:2)
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 dist
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didn't have to pay for the social costs of that, the taxpayer is. But the taxpayer is also paying the price in greater carbon emissions, lower quality of life (at least for the unemployed), and loss of tax revenue, etc.
Stop referring to all people as taxpayers. It's creepy.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Did you mean... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
My god! (Score:3, Funny)
Design is awful (Score:2, Funny)
How can that be the apple datacenter !
Re:Design is awful (Score:5, Funny)
Back in the day when Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple and was building his own company (NeXT) he had the interior of the factory in which NeXTStations were built re-painted three times -- until it was *just* the right shade of grey. And this is not a joke.
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Yeah it's just begging for a backlit Apple logo on the roof, lighting up the sky like the Luxor.
What OS? (Score:2)
What OS will their servers run?
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OS X is Mach, not BSD.
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No. OS X is Mach, *and* is BSD. These things are not mutually exclusive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU [wikipedia.org]
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OS X is Mach, not BSD
sorta. OS X is both Mach and BSD.
The kernel is Mach, the OS is based on BSD (net and free).
Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X#History [wikipedia.org]
Re:What OS? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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...this is probably a billion dollar investment for Apple.
Is that why the 11-inch Macbook Air costs $1000?
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It costs $1000 because they had to custom-design a lot of internal parts and do stuff to make everything fit. For instance, the flash memory is directly on the board rather than in a separate enclosure attached by a SATA cable. Also, the display on the 11" apparently has more pixels than the display on my 13" MBP. Other than the fact that it's tragically small and that I don't think I could realistically be able to work on anything smaller than my 13", it seems like a pretty nice machine, at least when c
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It cost less to put the FLASH on the motherboard, since in the latter case you incur the cost of cables, separate enclosure, and a daughterboard.
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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 pa
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Clearly the name of my company in your scenario is Orange Computer. ;-)
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"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.
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Well, not for all cases. You have to base your price point on what people are willing to pay where you can still make money. You have to pay the engineers designing custom wirewraps, buy the materials, etc. After that, you still need to make a profit, but not try and gouge too much, otherwise even Steve isn't going to be able to justify it.
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"Well, not for all cases. You have to base your price point on what people are willing to pay where you can still make money."
Not exactly. You just base your price tag on what people are willing to pay.
If that happens to be below your production costs you either don't go into market (so there won't be a price point) or you revisit your engineering till the production costs go below people's price tag*1, so no, you don't base your price point on your production costs but you set your production costs as a f
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Which won't put a significant dent in their $51 billion dollar cash reserves.
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HAHA Stone Mountain. Have you checked that out thoroughly? What a joke. Maybe not though, but they sure have developed a shady reputation, and construction is at a standstill.
Hey, (Score:2)
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Because my state legislature bent over and asked for apples two-inch dick. The tax incentives they gave for the damn thing are rediculous.
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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.
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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
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Distributed data centers are a very good thing for the following reasons:
1. California doesn't have as much available power generation as the site in North Carolina
2. Disaster Recovery operations can proceed at the new site for California data centers, and vice versa
3. If they are to launch some type of streaming service, having a datacenter less than 1000 miles from 60% of the US population is probably a good idea
Coming to a thumbdrive near you! (Score:2)
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.
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Some day all the processing power and storage in that place will fit on something you can hold in your hand.
See? That wasn't so hard.
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.
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You just described hosting, which is pretty much what the web is based on. People have been doing this for a long time, it just sounds like Apple (and everyone else who is doing it, eg Google) are just making a more convenient way to access the sort of ability that nerds have had for a long time.
As with any data, if you let it out of your control (ie, entrust it to someone else) then you are taking a risk. If you want to keep it more secure, store it locally.
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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.
Reading the article it appears to be pure speculation that Apple is using the data center for cloud storage. I haven't heard of any Apple initiatives in the cloud at all . In fact, it's not a new datacenter but an expansion of an existing center. It might be that the datacenter is not even to store your data but their own. After all, Apple's iTunes itself stores and serves millions of songs, tens of thousands of movies, and thousands of TV shows, etc.. In the next 90 days, Apple will launch their Mac A
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Done properly - with proper encryption etc, it's not a concern at all.
Well, there is a concern, namely legalization of it, but it's the same with the data on your HD. They - the law enforcement - (theoretically) can make you turn it on and check every file just about any time soon. TrueCrypt? You are forced to enter the password or face problems.
> Disclaimer: I'm not a conspiracy theorist nut.
Uhm... appropriate.
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"...The data gets stored locally but mirrored to iDisk..."
Again, my first question.
At what point does this data become THEIRS? Is the "copy' on the cloud owned by someone other then YOU? I shouldn't have to point out the ramifications of your data belonging to anyone but you.
Does Apple claim any legal ownership, even in the form of license, of/to your data simply because it is stored on their hardware?
Did your lawyers examine the fine print? I am quite sure theirs did.
See my point? Why would the industry su
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Does Apple claim any legal ownership, even in the form of license, of/to your data simply because it is stored on their hardware?
No. What possible reason do you have to think they would?
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Because you pay them to use their services. MobileMe isn't free, you need to pay for it every year.
In Apple's case, they have their iTunes store, which has massive amounts of data from all the music, TV Shows, movies, applications and podcasts.
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Well we already know what the likes of Google get out of it - more information about you, so they can target ads at you better. You ask what Apple gets out of it? $USD99/year This is exactly why I'm happy to pay apple for 20GB of space that I can use for email, storage, when the whole world seems to be in love with Google. What surprises me most of all is how many ne
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This is the reason I also have a MM account. No wink, wink, nudge, nudge and "accidental" leaks of personal information to advertisers. There is no third party in the mix with conflicting interests, just the E-mail provider and the end user.
TANSTAAFL.
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They don't get data. They get mind share. It a really cheap way to keep you engaged with their brand. You get locked into a workflow using their convenient tools which keeps you tied to the platform that supports those tools.
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You had me at "convenient tools", which is far less ominous sounding than "mind share".
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"They already try and get you in to long-term contracts (MobileMe to get FindMyiPhone and iDisk). That's where their monetization comes from, not from searching and selling ads. "
Bingo. Just as I said--a middleman between me and my data. Pay up or you lose access to whatever is stored. Sure, I could have a hard-copy(?) back-up on a drive just in case they do something like this, but what in the hell is the point of using them in the first place?
Monthly fees for a backup? Why not just purchase one-time-fee-a
Anyone have the coordinates? (Score:2)
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So in other words, you don't know what the coordinates are.
Well... Let me see... Hmmmm...
Punching apple Maiden, North Carolina [google.com] into Google Maps yields some interesting results. I wonder... Could this possibly point to the solution of your question?
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Are you sure that's not Apple Tree Service you found?
Nevermind. iForgot.
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Nope. "A" is the spot. Compare the sat to the video.
Well done Sir. Thanks.
Not in a flood area, I hope (Score:3, Informative)
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 [google.com], and here is FEMA's flood map [fema.gov] (note: FEMA's link was working earlier, but now appears to be broken -- I hope I got the link right).
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I would imagine that they would think of this, and every other environmental concern before dropping $1,000,000,000 into it. But hey, stupider things have happened with much larger sums of money, usually at the hands of governmental authorities.
Nothing to be proud of (Score:2)
Apple sells hardware. All of this is non-revenue generating investment, it's just a way to consume profits.
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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.
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Again Nothing to be proud of
Why do you need a data center to have an app store?
A truly smart solution would leverage the enormous unused CPU power of the client systems.
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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 effort
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Because you need a place to STORE the apps in your app store? Gonna "leverage the enormous unused [disk capacity] of the client systems" too? I'm sure no one around here would scream bloody murder about either of those schemes.
"OMGAWD Apple is using my CPU without my permisson!!" - Random Slashbot
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Apple would open themselves to a world of hurt by doing that. Using clients for P2P is verboten almost everywhere on the Internet. To boot, people would be complaining about the CPU usage, and the fact that they are paying Apple for the store, so why do they also have to pay in CPU and bandwidth as well (see the Blizzard flame threads around WoW patch days for examples of this.)
On the other hand, A data center makes perfect sense, especially if it is used for serving applications. I wonder if Apple's app
Wow, no style. (Score:2)
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?
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Most likely a combination of zoning and engineering.
Floors above the 1st floor mean greater engineering for load bearing, etc. from my layman's perspective. Cheaper to just pour a slab, especially if you have the real estate for it.
yes but... (Score:2)
can it play quake?
Love the SIG but you're not from Québec (Score:2)
Ton vocabulaire te marque comme un Français où un Wallon. (J'ai étudié les jurons. :-)
Am I the only one who thought... (Score:2)
Mayday! Mayday! I think I'm flying into a mountain! Tell my wife I lo...
Someone else has access to this data center? (Score:2)
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.
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Wow, how did you come up with that joke!
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I tried real hard. Hey, at least I didn't go Firs# Pos# (I promised myself never to utter those words).
Re:I just hope... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Return of the Jedi (Score:4, Funny)
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"Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!"
Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
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.
Obvious use: App Store (Score:2)
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.
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"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?
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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?
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Yeah, offering optional services that people will find compelling enough to voluntarily pay for. What an evil manipulative bastard!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I know a Lieutenant Commander from Starfleet that would disagree with you.
i want the moron who downmodded this answer me (Score:2)
either you havent, or the system again allowed a witless fanboi to get mod points.
getting downmodded isnt a problem. the zealotry is.
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Is there a square meter of the Earth's surface that hasn't been flown over and photographed in the last month?
Actually yes, you can find censored sat/aerial photos all over the place.
Reading is not writing... (Score:3, Informative)
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. :-)
TURN DOWN YOUR SPEAKERS!!!! - John C. Dvorak (Score:2)
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.