Apple’s New North Carolina Data Center Ready to Roll | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s New North Carolina Data Center Ready to Roll

money.cnn.com

14 pointskoski11 comments

Let me give you a handle on how big (physically) this farm is: half a million square feet, with another half million they're planning on building.

In comparison, the Boeing Everett plant, where they manufacture half the world's airliners, is 4.2 million square feet. That building contains, IIRC, four production lines.

The Apple server farm, when finished, will be the size of the Boeing 747 assembly line.

Or if you prefer, the Empire State building has about a quarter of a million square feet of floorspace, so it'll fill two Empire State Buildings.

Or for a somewhat less impressive measure, the average size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter is 180,000 square feet, so it's about two and a half of those.

I believe the "Wal-Mart" is too American to ever make it as a SI unit.

Another perspective, its about 6.5 football (soccer) pitches and will apparently double to 13!

If they fill the the entire building with rows of cabinets spaced by 2m they would have 23.2km of cabinets, about 46400. Enough space for 1.85 million 1u servers... but I am just getting carried away now.

I presume there's no info about what kit they're actually using in there? I'm guessing it's not XServes?

Sadly, this is the one piece of the operation about which there doesn't seem to be a flood of rumors, let-alone informed ones.

Being Apple, could they possible have a joint announcement planned for both the facility and for a total makeover of XServe line (emphasizing GreenPower, price-wise farm-suitable servers). Would it not be embarrassing for Apple to stock the place with a non-Apple product? At the same time, would it not be absurd to risk the success of a data center this size on an (relatively) inefficient, second-rate hardware config?

Either way, it should be an opportunity for a huge Apple PR event.

Fingers crossed, though I rather suspect they will keep this schtum (especially if they've gone non-apple).

Alternatively, I might just be full of Mac Mini Server boxes — but I wouldn't bet on it.

Gruber seems to believe that they are most certainly not using Xserves: “You don’t think Apple is filling that North Carolina data center with Xserves, do you?” (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/22/gosling-java-mac...) He, however, doesn’t indicate whether that’s speculation or whether he has sources.

Another question would be to the OS on the servers. Darwin running headless, maybe?

When James Gosling was moaning about Apple deprecating their JVM he mentioned that Apple's WebObjects stuff was actually running on Sun hardware.

http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/steve_jobs_comments_o...

This article has some info from the job postings for the center: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/07/21/the-t...

"data center environment consists of MacOS X, IBM/AIX, Linux and SUN/Solaris systems." and more details on the infrastructure and networking parts.

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