“What Internet magic lurks inside Apple’s massive new data center in North Carolina? The company isn’t saying, even as it confirmed [recently] that the facility will be coming online by the end of the year,” Rich Miller reports for Data Center Knowledge. “But job postings provide some broad details about the hardware and software that will be powering the new iDataCenter, much of which is provided by companies other than Apple.”
MacDailyNews Note: This Data Center Knowledge article was originally posted on July 21, 2010. Somehow, we missed it the first time around. If you did, too, here you go!
Miller continues, “The $1 billion data center will be about 500,000 square feet, nearly five times the size of Apple’s existing 109,000 square foot Newark, Calif. facility.”
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Here are some factoids gleaned from Apple’s job postings:
• Apple says that its “data center environment consists of MacOS X, IBM/AIX, Linux and SUN/Solaris systems.”
• The Maiden facility will have a “heavy emphasis” on high availability technologies, including IBM’s HACMP and HAGEO solutions for high-availability clusters, Veritas Cluster Server, and Oracle’s DataGuard and Real Application Clusters.
• Job candidates are also asked to be familiar with storage systems using IBM, NetApp and Data Domain, and data warehousing systems from Teradata.
• Networking positions require a familiarity with Brocade and Qlogic switches.
Read more in the full article, which also contains links to related coverage of Apple’s NC data center, here.
no windoze ?
The empire expands it’s footing
I wonder if they will keep the Newark facility open. Hope so because Newark needs the revenue.
Does Oracle have a version which will run on OS X?
At last! Somethin’ to render AE project remotly!
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“no windoze ?”
Apple wants to avoid a situation like the T-Mobile/Danger data loss fiasco of last October.
It’s mega-snappy!
To put the building’s size in perspective, the average size of a Safeway or Fry’s grocery store is in the neighborhood of 50k.
Shame it’s not all based on X-Serves running OS X Server, but this sort of high availability clustered solution is out of Apple’s league. At least there’s no HP sh*t in there…
Aw man.. no Nexus, no EMC, MDS. no Virtualization!!
Q: Does Oracle have a version which will run on OS X?
A: YES
“Shame it’s not all based on X-Serves running OS X Server, but this sort of high availability clustered solution is out of Apple’s league.”
You sir are a knuckle head…Sometimes it’s cheaper to use another vendors solution rather than devote your in house talent to developing it. There are plenty of High Availability OS X clusters running on Apple gear. ALL of them run customer produced custom software.
The truth is, Apple doesn’t have a solution for everything in the server arena and if they had to rely soley on in-house solutions, expansion would be extremely painful.
What I’m reading here is, Apple is taking a hands-on approach here, doing the hiring.
Perhaps someone could clarify Apple’s approach. Wouldn’t a company ordinarily contract out such services for a particular group of services, leaving the vendor to do the hiring?
As I mentioned the other day, this building can actually be seen from outer space! If you take Google Earth and go to the elevation of about 100km (the definition of outer space by FAI — Fédération Aéronautique Internationale), you’ll still be able to see the white speck on the ground. I have no doubt, when Shuttle overflies this area of NC, the crew can see the structure from the orbit.
If you goto Google maps , Maiden NC, and zero in on the junction of Startown Rd and US 321 and clk on space view you can see the entrance. Its marked Apple. Unfortunatly the west side is still a year old and the east side looks like this summer. Hey Google!!! Update your Map!!!!
It would make sense to keep the Newark facility open as a Disaster Recovery site. When I think of High Availability, I also have expectations for multiple-site redundancy of all systems and full disaster recovery; not necessarily matching capacities.
Hmmm—looks like GameCenter is going more awesome than Apple has let on…
@Norm,
Google is too busy trying to take shots through the windows.
Can you say “Video HyperStreaming”?
I don’t think it takes much to see what is happening here with Apple.
They are going to be one of the largest content distributors in the world.
Ouch There is no apple data center in Google Maps !!!
Shore is a good thing all them Brocade and QLogic folk be sitting in Maiden these past few years waiting for them jobs to come up.
On the other hand, if you come into Maiden with those skills, there is a lot of really nice housing and land you can snap up cheaply.
Smart! Multiple vendors should be used in data centers like this one because attacks against a specific OS/system won’t shut down the whole thing. Vulnerabilities always exists and when one system is exploited, Apple can just shut it down and move the load to different systems while they work on a fix.
“IBM/AIX, Linux and SUN/Solaris systems”
I don’t get it. So Apple is saying that OSX can’t do everything so they need to run all these other systems? That’s kind of a failure. I thought it would be 100% OSX.