

Apple said to be building $1 billion server farm - Anon84
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/05/23/apple_said_building_1_billion_server_farm.html

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jonknee
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.

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

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mahmud
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.

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zyb09
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.

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mahmud
This is not a bil in cash; they're most likely adding up the retail price of
their own hardware sitting in warehouses and other stuff they can "license" to
themselves for free.

If we say the cash cost to them is about half of that, I think 500 mil can be
recouped selling their services to about 50 or so large corporations and
governments.

Apple has cash to burn and it needs another business leg to hedge against its
consumer offerings. 500 mil in R&D and insurance sounds about right. We will
have to wait to hear what they tell their shareholders, in any event.

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DenisM
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.

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

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lallysingh
At least 100 people: [http://www.tuaw.com/2009/05/25/apple-building-server-
farm-se...](http://www.tuaw.com/2009/05/25/apple-building-server-farm-secret-
lair-in-north-carolina/)

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

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DenisM
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...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/05/22/ServerUnder30W.aspx)

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

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

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jonknee
While they're spending a billion dollars, I wouldn't be surprised if they
developed some custom hardware.

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nazgulnarsil
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.

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DenisM
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?

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

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enomar
That is actually an interesting thing to ponder (what would happen if there
were no direct federal taxes). Instead, taxes would be funneled through local
or state governments, which would be responsible for contributing some amount
of that to the federal government. Local governments could then tweak who,
what and how much they tax in order to attract business. Policy might also
become less homogeneous across cities and states because the federal
government would have less money to hold over the heads of local policy
makers. But maybe not...just thinking out loud here...

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nazgulnarsil
agreed. on the face of it it seems stupid that if you have to have taxes, the
taxer should care where the money comes from or how it was collected from the
taxee. But then you realize that it was never about the money. the government
can print more money any time it wants. it is about control.

