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Aerial video shows Apple's 500,000 sq. ft. server farm in NC

updated 06:50 pm EST, Mon February 22, 2010

Facility built upon 225 acres of land


An aerial video, captured from a helicopter, allegedly shows Apple's new data-center located on 225 acres of land in Maiden, North Carolina. The enormous building is said to cover 500,000 square feet of floor space, over four times the area available in the company's server farm in Newark, California. The project is said to have cost over $1 billion.

The sheer size of Apple's data center has ignited speculation that the company is planning a large expansion of its cloud computing endeavors. Apple's recent acquisition of Lala is believed to involve a web-based version of iTunes, potentially allowing users to manage content directly from an Internet browser rather than relying on the current software.

Apple has yet to disclose detailed plans for its new facility in North Carolina. [via Data Center Knowledge]


by MacNN Staff

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 Investor, industry, Apple, North Carolina, cloud

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Comments

  1. msuper69

    Mac Elite

    Joined: Jan 2000

    -1
    02/22, 08:15pm | report spam | Reply |

    Well ....

    that was worthless.

  1. Constable Odo

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Aug 2007

    +1
    02/22, 10:53pm | report spam | Reply |

    Apple should have placed it in an

    underground bunker so the media couldn't see what was going on and then they'd have even more to speculate about. Four times the area of the California server farm and with the increase in the capacity of hard drives, that could yield a heck of a lot of storage. Yeah, free storage for all Apple mobile devices or a proprietary Apple search engine.

    I had read that RIM was going to build an additional datacenter somewhere in the state of Georgia but would only be about 60,000 square feet in area. Microsoft's new server farm in Texas is supposed to be about 470,000 square feet in area. These companies are really going to have a heck of a lot of cloud storage.

  1. panjandrum

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Dec 2004

    +1
    02/23, 08:57am | report spam | Reply |

    Cloud computing and multimedia

    It will be interesting to see how this whole cloud computing things works out. Like remote backup systems, this works fairly well if most of your work is of the "office" nature - documents in Pages or Numbers for example. But the whole thing falls apart when you start talking about the amount of data many Mac users deal with. Working on an iMovie project stored "in the cloud" just isn't currently feasible. From what I'm reading we won't have the infrastructure in the USA to support the kinds of speeds necessary for that for quite some time. Maybe that kind of speed will come to some of the major metropolitan areas fairly soon and then maybe we will get an idea of where this is all going. Unfortunately we've seen that when the infrastructure is left up to the private sector, smaller metropolitan areas are often blessed with the new technology years behind, and if you live in a rural area, well you might as well just give up. So how will this be managed from a social point (equal access) of view? Or, will we someday see a "Shockwave Rider" scenario (John Brunner, novel where the term "Worm" was coined. Well worth a read.) On the other hand, I've seen indications that a distributed system might actually be the way of the future. Essentially everyone might have their own "cloud" (I really don't like that term). Their own systems in their home or office will serve their data to them wherever they are, either by allowing access directly to the files or via. remote control (VNC, ARD, etc.). In a way this makes a lot more sense, and many people have already setup their systems to function this way.

    On a more amusing note, it could lead to an interesting change in backup behavior: "Every night my computer goes out to "my cloud" and makes sure all the remote data is copied to a local hard-drive right here..." :)

  1. Tanker10a

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Jan 2003

    +2
    02/23, 09:40am | report spam | Reply |

    Yeah

    Big Deal!

  1. Fast iBook

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Mar 2003

    0
    02/23, 06:47pm | report spam | Reply |

    Green?

    Why did they have to chop down so many trees, why not at least give it a green roof? What the h*** apple?

    - A

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