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Apple Officially Selects North Carolina for New $1 Billion Data Center
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I'm not a pro on server farms or data centers, but aren't these jobs post graduate jobs? Server admins, etc? I'm sure there might be a few entry level positions, but it seems the higher salaries would make the average higher anyway. Seems like someone is trying to fleece some people about "making sure they have a higher salary" and health-care? Most full time jobs offer health-care - I'm talking about full time jobs not part time jobs turned into full time jobs. I think the salaries/health-care were a given, and the government just wanted to take on the role of "we'll take care of you, look".
Can anyone prove me right/wrong? Like I said I don't know the inner workings of a data center.
OK off my soapbox - great for the area though!!
I still reckon Iceland or some other northerly region with lots of cold air and geothermal hotness would be an excellent place to build datacentres - get the power from the Earth and you have lots of cold air for cooling the hardware, saves on air con and you'd get your power for negligable costs and without the uncertain supply of other renewables.
Plus I think Iceland could do with some new industry and it's slap bang in between Europe and the US.
Watcha think?
I think
Think about the Eastern coast of the United States. How much network traffic goes up and down that coast? Put a site there that can take advantage of it, and off you go.
Now, look at Iceland, how much network cable is strung across the Atlantic that goes near enough there to have any effect?
Now the real question is, how does Apple think that this is going to create a return on the investment? Without the datacenter, people would still buy their music and movies, and it would be downloaded from California or one of their other datacenters/partners.
No, I think this is for something new. The only thing that you could host that would generate revenue is streaming rentals. To wireless devices. Or even better, you save YOUR music collection on THEIR server and they serve it up wirelessly to your device anywhere on Earth. The proximity of the datacenter to the major East Coast cities, and the vast amounts of fiber out there, and you have some interesting possibilities.
That's how you make a new building pay for itself.
I haven't worked in a data centre for a long time. I doubt there will be that many technical staff working in it, the fewer the better for security reasons.
But its easy to forget all the non-technical support staff you need to keep a building like that up and running, just the simple things like security and cleaning as well as all the people involved in building it in the first place.
Plus it brings a lot of money in to the local economy, which filters down.
Whilst that would be nice, the problem is the upload speeds most people have - they just aren't anywhere near fast enough yet to do things like upload your entire music collection to a host.
I'm not convinced this will mean any new services. It will take a while for it to be built and the growth of existing services will need a lot more resources by then. Or it could just be bringing in house some of the things they currently outsource - aren't a lot of the iTunes resources provided by a 3rd party?
OK makes some sense. I think they probably have a top notch background check in place, at least I would hope so, so I don't see how security would be an issue.
But I was talking about (and was under the interpretation) that they were relating to the salaries of the employees of the facility, not the contracted workers (cleaning staff, etc). These salaries are not negotiated by Apple, but by the owners of the companies that hold the contract. Still great for the local economy though.
There was a service 10 years ago now probably where you typed in your UPC code and they unlocked that music in your online profile so you could only listen to music you owned. Or so the plan went. It was pretty cool. No uploading, no downloading, just a painful process of typing UPC codes.
Its not so much a question of whether they are a security risk or not, its more to do with whether they need access or not - if they don't need access, they don't have access.
It might seem stupid, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Mr Jobs himself doesn't have access to their data centres or at least doesn't have access to any of the areas with the equipment in - unless he is escorted by someone that does. Obviously he isn't a security risk, but what possible reason could there be for him wandering around in a room full of their computer equipment?
Disaster Recovery is a huge option for almost any company. Having the greater distance is a good way of keeping things going if something happens. I work in the Twin Cities and our local disaster recovery site is on the other side town. The only real time anyone goes there is tech people to update and check things. Most of our operations are looked at via our tech services located in NC, Texas, and Oklahoma. They are sent warnings if anything starts to fail or a connection is lost. Now if something goes wrong at the live site then we drive across town, but if something major happens then it will be harder to fix. We do have major backups in NC where a select few from our current site would have to go to keep operations going.
One of our branches did a similar thing when Katrina hit. They had to relocate everything to one of our sites in Texas.
NC is the location of our main backbone of our services of the company I work for. Our sites located all of the United States use NC as the main services and Little Rock is the second in line.
Wish they would build on in Orlando, Florida so I could work there! Too many hurricanes I guess.
Too many hurricanes I guess. 
i think this is great for apple and the state of north carolina. hopefully this will mean more reliable services from apple
May want to filter or remove humitidy, but don't necessarily need to run it through chillers.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/09/18/intel-servers-do-fine-with-outside-air/
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9133836
http://www.itworld.com/data-center/54107/oracle-looks-utah-green-data-center
http://earth2tech.com/2009/04/08/low-hanging-fruit-for-green-data-centers-plain-old-air/
There are also newer designs which use large diameter fans and enclosures to move the cold air more efficiently, directly through the immediate area of the racks as oppose of chilling the whole room down to low temperatures.
For rooms/buildings that were designed around old principles, yes. You do need more universally engaged chillers.
The opposite is also true. Don't need a furnace or heater in cold climates if have a server farm. Cray used to have a building in Minneapolis that had no furnance. The couple of supercomputers running in the building keep that building warm even in the dead of winter.
Unclear whether the money to GM / AIG / etc. is being thown away. The majority of AIG isn't going to die. It was a very small part of AIG that made a colossal screw of of the entire financial market...... not just their own company.
Similarly GM and Chrysler can pay off some of the money loaned. Chrysler did it before. This time it would be a stretch to get all of it back, but it is certainly possible to get a heath fraction of this money back.
If GM and Chrysler collapsed in an uncontrolled fashion the government would be out billions anyway ( pension insurance, unemployment, more medicare parcitpants, etc. ) in addition to more months of market chaos (which leads to decreased tax revenues.
Giving Apple ($20+ billion cash hoard) a tax break is bit like when cities pay for stadiums for professional sports teams. For 50 employees long term ... that's likely a taxpayer give away in the long run. (unless somehow the equipment over the long term gets hit with a local sales tax. There are corporate ways to duck and weave around that though. )
Our main site is in St. Paul and this spring the A/C went out in our server room, it went from 45 degrees to 85 in a matter about half and hour. This was with us having fans and doors open. They could not get the unit working so they just opened outside air to come in through the ducts. It was easy to bring the temp down in the middle of the night with the air here. Only problem was we need some extra portable de-humidifiers to pull the humiditiy out of the air.
I certainly hope a $9b "data center" does a heck of a lot more than improve downloads / MobileMe / iDisk (the latter two aren't even used by a large population). Hopefully Apple will open up soon about what exactly they plan to do with this center - if it's simply a server farm for their self-hosted internet services currently offered, it seems like overkill. Perhaps they have a bunch of new services in the works...
It's probably just for App Store/MobileMe/iTunes. The growth of the App Store probably mitigated this. People are looking too deeply into this thinking it is some master plan. If Apple continued buying up land for server farms, then it would be a story. As it is, it's just for transfer speeds and stability.
I'm with mongoos150 on this one. I think Apple is going to offer some new services. Time will tell.
Now, look at a globe instead of a distorted flat map, and you'll see that Iceland is not far from the shortest route between New England and Old England. Transatlantic flights used to stop there all the time for refueling before longer-distance jets made that unnecessary; I would guess there are a lot of undersea cables that go through there as well.
unless there are already internet backbone cables running through Iceland, which there are...
$1,000,000,000 ...for a data centre.
What can they be putting in there? How do you spend $1bn? A few hundred million I can see, but a billion?
Maybe they will be the only people to actually pay for a truly massive deployment of XServes
What can they be putting in there? How do you spend $1bn? A few hundred million I can see, but a billion?
Maybe they will be the only people to actually pay for a truly massive deployment of XServes