“Like Google and Amazon, Apple delivers web services to hundreds of millions of people across the globe — at last count, iCloud served over 250 million souls — and that requires a whole new breed of hardware and software, stuff that’s far more efficient than the gear inside most data centers,” Cade Metz reports for Wired. “You can think of this as the technology of tomorrow. As the web continues to grow, the tech used by the Apples and the Googles will trickle down to the rest of the world. In many cases, it already has.”
“What we do know is that Apple is spending mountains of money on a new breed of hardware device from a company called Fusion-io… Inside a data center like the one Apple operates in Maiden, North Carolina, you’ll find thousands of computer servers,” Metz reports. “Fusion-io makes a slim card that slots inside these machines, and it’s packed with hundreds of gigabytes of flash memory, the same stuff that holds all the software and the data on your smartphone. You can think of this card as a much-needed replacement for the good old-fashioned hard disk that typically sits inside a server. Much like a hard disk, it stores information. But it doesn’t have any moving parts, which means it’s generally more reliable. It consumes less power. And it lets you read and write data far more quickly.”
Metz writes, “If you know anything about Fusion-io, you know that its chief scientist is Steve Wozniak, the man who founded Apple alongside high-school friend Steve Jobs.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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