

Apple’s New North Carolina Data Center Ready to Roll - koski
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/gigaom/mobile/2010_10_25_apples_new_north_carolina_data_center_ready_to_roll.html

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cstross
Let me give you a handle on how big (physically) this farm is: half a million
square feet, with another half million they're planning on building.

In comparison, the Boeing Everett plant, where they manufacture half the
world's airliners, is 4.2 million square feet. That building contains, IIRC,
four production lines.

The Apple server farm, when finished, will be the size of the Boeing 747
assembly line.

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hugh3
Or if you prefer, the Empire State building has about a quarter of a million
square feet of floorspace, so it'll fill two Empire State Buildings.

Or for a somewhat less impressive measure, the average size of a Wal-Mart
Supercenter is 180,000 square feet, so it's about two and a half of those.

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sudont
I believe the "Wal-Mart" is too American to ever make it as a SI unit.

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robgough
I presume there's no info about what kit they're actually using in there? I'm
guessing it's not XServes?

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FluidDjango
Sadly, this is the one piece of the operation about which there _doesn't_ seem
to be a flood of rumors, let-alone informed ones.

Being Apple, could they possible have a joint announcement planned for both
the facility and for a total makeover of XServe line (emphasizing GreenPower,
price-wise farm-suitable servers). Would it not be embarrassing for Apple to
stock the place with a non-Apple product? At the same time, would it not be
absurd to risk the success of a data center this size on an (relatively)
inefficient, second-rate hardware config?

Either way, it should be an _opportunity_ for a huge Apple PR event.

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ugh
Gruber seems to believe that they are most certainly not using Xserves: “You
don’t think Apple is filling that North Carolina data center with Xserves, do
you?” ([http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/22/gosling-java-
mac...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/22/gosling-java-mac-os-x))
He, however, doesn’t indicate whether that’s speculation or whether he has
sources.

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sudont
Another question would be to the OS on the servers. Darwin running headless,
maybe?

