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Aerial Footage of Apple's North Carolina Data Center

sux2beyou said:
Just an FYI, Apple will allow you to redownload all of your purchases as a one time exception (as in once in the lifetime of your iTunes Store Account)

Go to http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/ to ask for it.
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Yes, Apple will do that.

However, what I am trying to describe is a new business area that Apple could enter. That is providing a backup service for iTMS customers for a small monthly/annual fee or on a per movie/song basis. The cost to Apple is network use (bandwidth to transfer the files) and small management overhead.
 
KidIcarus412 said:
Its possible that one half of the data center is redundant of the other. Each side would have backup generators and possibly power coming from two different grids depending on location.

Or its the first of multiple data centers.
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Though this is not what is typically done. Also, the telco data centers I worked at are connected to a single grid. They also have large battery banks and in fact the entire facilities run on batteries at all times. The grid continually charges the batteries, so any power fluctuations get filtered at the battery level and do not propagate to the equipment. If the grid goes down, the generators automatically kick-in and start charging the battery bank (which typically has at least 24-hour capacity). There is an adequate generator fuel supply at each facility for 7 days. Beyond that, you expect for the grid to be repaired or you need to resupply the fuel. There are likely differences among the individual carriers and ISPs, but in general this is how our communications infrastructure used to function when I was in field eng'g a few years ago. :)
 
rdowns said:
I'd say they would be as happy as pigs in **** given the facts.

Apple is committed to investing $1 billion there over the next 9 years. That spending will create about 2,000 jobs. Jobs =tax revenues.
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So that works out to about $23,000 per job that they're subsidising, assuming most of the jobs are in the construction process and thus temporary. In all seriousness the purchase of these jobs is a bargain compared to the car companies subsidies really!
 
SkippyThorson said:
Pointless. Google's cornered the market. Between Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc etc, how many do we need? It's not like I need one for every day of the week. I use Google, and it gets the job done, and that's that. It can't be improved at the moment. It is what it is.

I feel like cloud computing is the most logical idea for this center. Things would be so much less of a hassle if the Operating System, applications, files, etc were all cloud based. Less weight to machines, less moving / breakable parts, more power to dedicate to the immediate system as all it's doing is manipulating files on a server... It all just makes more sense. One day, I think that's where we'll be heading.

I for one, want to work there. It looks like a great place. Then again, key words, 'looks like'.
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"Pointless"
Pointless to do iPhone, Nokia already cornered the market
Pointless to do Macs, MS already cornered the market

"How many do we need?"
How many phones do we need?
How many computers do we need?
How many mp3 players, eBook readers, TV boxes do we need?

"Get's the job done"
Nokia gets the job done, no need for iPhone
MS gets the job done, no need for Macs
..you get the idea by now

I don't know if Apple is doing a search engine, but every one of your arguments could be used against every and any of Apple products already on the market and is therefore not valid to counter the suggestion that Apple might in fact be planning a search engine ...Spotlight for the web anyone?
 
There have been some comments about power, but I'm interested to know if Apple is going to to sign up to "Green Power", if such a scheme is available in the area, and/or use other forms of renewable energy and how all this fits in with their environmental policy.
 
If I were Steve Jobs I'd just paddle around in that little pond all day in a dinghy.
 
libertyforall said:
So how do North Carolinians feeling about that $46 Million Apple corporate welfare?
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Considering that Charlotte was the hometown of one of those massive banks that went under, I'm sure they're thrilled to have business coming *into* Charlotte instead of leaving. From what I hear from locals, Charlotte has been an economic disaster since Wachovia went under.
 
Detrius said:
From what I hear from locals, Charlotte has been an economic disaster since Wachovia went under.
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You mean was bought by Wells Fargo?

Wikipedia said:
In its announcement, the FDIC stressed that Wachovia did not fail and was not placed into receivership. In addition, the FDIC said that the agency would absorb Citigroup's losses above $42 billion; Wachovia's loan portfolio is valued at $312 billion. In exchange for assuming this risk, the FDIC will receive $12 billion in preferred stock and warrants from Citigroup.
...
Though Citigroup was providing the liquidity that allowed Wachovia to continue to operate, Wells Fargo and Wachovia announced on October 3, 2008 they had agreed to merge in an all-stock transaction requiring no FDIC involvement, apparently nullifying the Citigroup deal.
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Jaro65 said:
Though this is not what is typically done. Also, the telco data centers I worked at are connected to a single grid. They also have large battery banks and in fact the entire facilities run on batteries at all times. The grid continually charges the batteries, so any power fluctuations get filtered at the battery level and do not propagate to the equipment. If the grid goes down, the generators automatically kick-in and start charging the battery bank (which typically has at least 24-hour capacity). There is an adequate generator fuel supply at each facility for 7 days. Beyond that, you expect for the grid to be repaired or you need to resupply the fuel. There are likely differences among the individual carriers and ISPs, but in general this is how our communications infrastructure used to function when I was in field eng'g a few years ago. :)
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I think your telco facilities are more the abnormality. Typically the battery banks are there to temporarily power the facility, as in closer to 15 minutes, until the generators have time to kick on and get up to speed. All of these factors can vary because of cost, space, the Tier they are going for etc.

I have actually been to this facility.
 
I Feel Sorry for the Future Employees

Looks like the nearest "city" is Gastonia, widely regarded as the "Armpit of the South", with nothing but miles and miles of fast-food joints, ugly strip malls of which half the shops are cellular or nail care shops, Wal-Marts, etc. They'd have to pay me a lot to have to live there, and the commute from Charlotte looks kind of long. I live in Wilmington and I hate to drive in this area, feeling I might get stuck in Gastonia like the roach trap it is.
 
jdylan said:
Looks like the nearest "city" is Gastonia, widely regarded as the "Armpit of the South", with nothing but miles and miles of fast-food joints, ugly strip malls of which half the shops are cellular or nail care shops, Wal-Marts, etc. They'd have to pay me a lot to have to live there, and the commute from Charlotte looks kind of long. I live in Wilmington and I hate to drive in this area, feeling I might get stuck in Gastonia like the roach trap it is.
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No big deal, they'll all be too busy working.

Steve

Sent from my iPad
 
Data Center?

This is a DATA CENTER? Why would a data center need that many loading bays? Are the servers expected to be that unreliable or is the data being delivered on 3.5 inch floppies?
 
mrrydogg said:
Seems by the video this could be a multi-purpose building, possibly a shipping hub too? There are a lot of freight doors on the side which leads me to believe they will be doing a lot of shipping/receiving. I'm no expert, so I may be way off base, but I can't imagine a server farms needs that kind of freight operation.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Sorry apple doesn't support multitasking remember? :D
 
libertyforall said:
So how do North Carolinians feeling about that $46 Million Apple corporate welfare?
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Ironic comment given your screen name. Tax incentives for generating income in a state is the opposite of corporate welfare.

Welfare is giving money to a non-contributor. That's the opposite of liberty.

I'd rather give $1000 to a corporation that employs people and generates wealth for the economy than to an able-minded/able-bodied loser who doesn't feel like working.
 
bradley212 said:
shouldn't they be building multiple redundant data centers so if this one goes offline, gets taken out, has a glitch -- no data will be lost.
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Did you skip over the initial article description that said that Apple already has a 100,000 sq ft. facility in Newark, CA? This is the back up. At least part of it likely is. More than 1/5 of it could be used to "duplicate' the current primary since lots of the data because farmed out by Apple is replicated to do load balancing. ( e.g., same iTunes content on multiple servers so that lots of concurrent downloads each get a slice of a computer. Easy to segregate people by country and other factors, but it is mostly the same content. )

The other issue is that Apple extremely unlikely to fill the whole place up right away. You build a larger data center so you don't have to build/buy another one for 4-5 years. Computers 2-3 years from now will be substantially better so why fill up the whole place in year 1 with tech you will have to throw away in a couple of years. It could be years before they get to the point that have data that is only located here and not replicated in the CA facility. (espeically if it is just compressed data backups and willing to run a "much slower, but good enough" level for extended period of time. )

They could also use part of the center for customer purchasing and advertising analytics. That may/may not want to back up it entirety.
Similarly, if have development and test-to-scale configurations those don't need to be backed up if data is pulled off the production servers.


However, when fully populate the place might have parts that are running without a disaster failover/recovery .... just like they are doing now.
 
Nuvi said:
You want to build your data center in the middle of nowhere.
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Microsoft's new mega centers are in Chicago (just outside) and San Antonio (not densest part though). You want to build your data center where there is affordable space, access to a nexus of redundant high speed data lines (if want to be a top tier center can't have a single internet provider) , and cheap power. Often it is a trade-off among the three. The four, somewhat secondary, feature often looking for is to a place less prone to disasters.... but just about everywhere has something... aways trading floods for tornadoes for earthquakes for hurricanes for volcano for etc. etc.

Oracle's largest one is in Austin.

IBM has several among a large one in Boulder.

Google had taken to going off into the economically depressed areas where power grid was there, but the industry collapsed (so gobs of excess capacity). That strategy tends to take you out into the middle of nowhere.

The NSA appears to want to but a big center out in the boonies but they have different issues and sure there is some "pork" in there somewhere.... there almost always is.


Once go to multiple large centers want them spread out and/or closer to hotspots in your data traffic. It makes lots of sense for Apple to put this center on the opposite side of the country so that the CA one can serve one hemisphere and the NC one the other hemisphere. Until Apple commits to building an center outside the US distributing them around the edges where relatively closer to major data lines come in from the ocean will work better to distribute worldwide load.


This placement has diddly to do with some CA poltico agenda. The primary data center already is in CA. Apple is not going to shutdown the Newark facility. Apple could also go "tick tock" with expansions so next round CA would be a more likely site (than something East Coast). If there is another "deep discount" sale on a bigger facility in Silicon Valley in next couple of years they may pick it up and largely move elements of the same personnel over to the bigger building.
 
mrrydogg said:
Seems by the video this could be a multi-purpose building, possibly a shipping hub too?
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The loading dock door are toward the front of the building. As another poster mentions those larger "cutouts" seem likely for air intakes ( as well as most of the section of the building being devoted to a large centrailized HVAC operations. (it isn't 500,000 sq ft of just sever racks. ) You spend about as much energy ( it not cold enough to just blow chilled air in from outside) cooling the place as you do doing the "computing".

The relatively smaller doors on the side of that front section of the building seem more likely loading docks. Kind of hard to tell from the blurring youtube video though, but are about the same size as a truck coming up the ramp on the same side of building at 0:30. If those ports are large enough for:

http://www.sgi.com/products/data_center/ice_cube/
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/02/11/active-power-hp-team-on-powered-containers/

those kind of containers you can just slide in/out computational power as need more. May need to ship in lots of containers if trying to recover from some major problem ( fire, disaster, etc. ), so just don't want to have one or two intake "ports" for these containers.
Even if going with the relatively "old school" rack style (dubious but maybe have already committed to it) will periodically get just as much stuff hitting the doors on ramp up/down of equipment.



You actually do not want lots of people roaming around inside the data center building. A shipping hub would have all kinds of warehouse workers and truck traffic tramping through the datacenter complex. That is a bad thing.
 
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