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First Look: Apple's Massive iDataCenter

23 points by 1SockChuck 17y ago

altano 17y ago
"with most speculation focusing on a shift of iTunes user libraries from user desktops to online storage" Yeah right, they can't even make MobileMe work despite people inexplicably throwing gobs of money at them to do just that. How many years have they had to fix that garbage? Although I guess they don't need to when the expectations are so low: the last satisfied customer I talked to said "It works perfectly, other than occasionally deleting all my contacts." (I say this as someone who's given .Mac and MobileMe one shot each and almost shot myself in the face as a result)
- arfrank 17y ago
  That is unless they start acquiring companies with the talent they want to build a cloud experience that really works. They have acquired multiple companies to build out a suite of products in the past, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple#Acquisitions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition.... That being said this might be how they start utilizing their recent purchase of lala.com and they might be looking forward to complete the iLife suite on the web.
mos1 17y ago
How much square footage does one really need to support iTunes in the cloud? I suppose their market share puts some pretty heavy demands on scalability, but a 500k sf datacenter is a lot of datacenter, and storage is fairly dense these days. Add to that the fact that music files deduplicate very well across millions of people and I'm left wondering if they're doing photos and video too, or something else altogether, or if my back of the envelope estimates of the square footage requirements for such a service are just way off.
keltex 17y ago
I'll be curious if they end up using their shiny Xserve servers (starting at $3K retail) or they end up using cheaper ones.
- mortenjorck 17y ago
  I'm kind of guessing Apple can get them at cost.
  - markkanof 17y ago
    While that's true, it might be interesting to see if they end up making any changes to thier Xserve product line based things they learn while using them in a massive data center.
mortenjorck 17y ago
Google makes a vertically-integrated smartphone, Apple builds a massive datacenter. I think the upshot here is simple: It's on.
- maximilian 17y ago
  I wouldn't really call it "vertically integrated". HTC made it. Sure google told them what to make, and I guess you could say apple tells foxconn what to make, but I feel like google just said, "Make us a sweet, thin, keyboardless, phone, with these properties."

23 points by 1SockChuck 17y ago

"with most speculation focusing on a shift of iTunes user libraries from user desktops to online storage" Yeah right, they can't even make MobileMe work despite people inexplicably throwing gobs of money at them to do just that. How many years have they had to fix that garbage? Although I guess they don't need to when the expectations are so low: the last satisfied customer I talked to said "It works perfectly, other than occasionally deleting all my contacts." (I say this as someone who's given .Mac and MobileMe one shot each and almost shot myself in the face as a result)

arfrank 17y ago
That is unless they start acquiring companies with the talent they want to build a cloud experience that really works. They have acquired multiple companies to build out a suite of products in the past, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple#Acquisitions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition.... That being said this might be how they start utilizing their recent purchase of lala.com and they might be looking forward to complete the iLife suite on the web.

mos1 17y ago

How much square footage does one really need to support iTunes in the cloud? I suppose their market share puts some pretty heavy demands on scalability, but a 500k sf datacenter is a lot of datacenter, and storage is fairly dense these days. Add to that the fact that music files deduplicate very well across millions of people and I'm left wondering if they're doing photos and video too, or something else altogether, or if my back of the envelope estimates of the square footage requirements for such a service are just way off.

keltex 17y ago

I'll be curious if they end up using their shiny Xserve servers (starting at $3K retail) or they end up using cheaper ones.

mortenjorck 17y ago
I'm kind of guessing Apple can get them at cost.
- markkanof 17y ago
  While that's true, it might be interesting to see if they end up making any changes to thier Xserve product line based things they learn while using them in a massive data center.

mortenjorck 17y ago

Google makes a vertically-integrated smartphone, Apple builds a massive datacenter. I think the upshot here is simple: It's on.

maximilian 17y ago
I wouldn't really call it "vertically integrated". HTC made it. Sure google told them what to make, and I guess you could say apple tells foxconn what to make, but I feel like google just said, "Make us a sweet, thin, keyboardless, phone, with these properties."