Apple said to be building $1 billion server farm

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/05/23/apple_said_building_1_billion_server_farm.html

by Anon84 • 17 years ago

22 23 17 years ago

an excellent demonstration of the sort of regulation competition that should be commonplace. if states were allowed to more freely compete for business corporate taxes would be driven down to a reasonable market rate.

DenisM4• 17 years ago

Well, the states are allowed to compete on taxation policies. For example Boeing was strong-arming several states for the tax breaks around their 7e7 plane-building factory.

Can you point out something to the contrary?

nazgulnarsil3• 17 years ago

um...the fact that the vast majority of taxes are federal taxes that the states can't do anything about?

DenisM4• 17 years ago

Everyone who has money should be building those. The economics of abundant bandwidth one one hand and software mangement costs on the other dictate massive centralization of computing. Like Amazon't VP of technology said: Amazon pioneered it's massive IT infrastructure because it was the first to need it. Torrow, everyone will need it.

zandorg• 17 years ago

I don't get it. Are the servers Apple Macs?

DenisM4• 17 years ago

They are mac minis. Ultra-small servers are the latest hot(or cold, as it were) trend, for example Dell just shipped this 30 watt server: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/05/22/ServerUnder30W.a...

Apple has been at it for a while now: http://www.macminicolo.net/

dmytton2• 17 years ago

macminicolo.net is not an Apple company, they just allow you to colo a Mac Mini as a server.

CrazedGeek• 17 years ago

I'd think that the servers would be primarily Xserves: http://www.apple.com/xserve/

mseebach• 17 years ago

> http://www.macminicolo.net/

That seems like an incredibly inefficient way to use a Mac Mini. Doesn't OSX play well with virtualization?

pj• 17 years ago

Anyone know how many people will be employed by a $1B data center?

lallysingh• 17 years ago

At least 100 people: http://www.tuaw.com/2009/05/25/apple-building-server-farm-se...

dmytton2• 17 years ago

The real question is what is Apple going to use the server farm for?

mahmud2• 17 years ago

Aside from getting them into the cloud or CDN business, it might also be useful to have a tangible deployment of Apple's enterprise technology, to keep AAPL in the minds of the executive crowd, now that traditional server vendors are dying out (SGI, Sun, etc.)

Beating a few benchmarks on performance, price or power-consumption is usually a good way to break into, or return to, a market.

Apple also has a rabid user base who will gobble up anything they put out.

zyb09• 17 years ago

Spending a billion just 'to keep AAPL in minds of the executive crowd' would be pretty dumb decision making and would put Apple right on the path of Sun.

joao• 17 years ago

Apple is already in the CDN business, they invested in Akamai in 1999.

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

A platform to run plug and and play web apps for Mac users. The salesforce of consumer apps.

EDIT: They are definitely not going to invest 1B to earn 46 million over 10 years. 46M will not even cover executive compensation for the same period.

jonknee2• 17 years ago

With the RAM prices Apple charges, that could be a pretty small server farm... On a more serious note, that should be a massive facility. On the order of 500,000 square feet.

Apple said to be building $1 billion server farm

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