

Apple hires Noteboom - Yahoo’s ex-data center chief - cavalcade
http://gigaom.com/cloud/apple-hires-yahoos-data-center-chief/

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mrb
Wow, this is big news.

Apple is building data centers _very far_ from being the state of the art, and
very costly. (And they were probably not enticed to do better, thanks to their
massive profits...) For example their latest $500M North Carolina facility is
running off-the-shelf enterprise equipment from NetApp and Teradata!:
[http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-06-08/tech/30072633...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-06-08/tech/30072633_1_netapp-
hp-gear) There appears to have been little or no effort spent on optimizing
cost, cooling, PUE, etc.

On the other hand, the top dogs built their data centers from the ground up
from commodity hardware highly customized to improve efficiency and reduce
cost. For example Facebook's tech is well documented in their
<http://opencompute.org> effort. Google is well-known to have advanced the
start-of-the-art in designing cloud-scale data centers based on commodity
parts: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html> Ditto for Yahoo
with their "chicken coop" data centers [http://gigaom.com/cleantech/now-
online-yahoos-chicken-coop-i...](http://gigaom.com/cleantech/now-online-
yahoos-chicken-coop-inspired-green-data-center) And Amazon is very secretive,
but very likely doing the same and building EC2 on top of commodity hardware.

The cloud is a race which will be won by whoever has the most efficient
computing infrastructure. Who do you think is going to win? Those who go as
far as designing their own 95%+ efficient PSU running on 277V (Facebook:
<http://opencompute.org/projects/power-supply/>) or those who buy run-of-the-
mill NetApp appliances?

Hiring Noteboom is a sign that Apple's executive leadership recognizes the
need to stop wasting money, and to start building serious data centers.

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foobarbazetc
Do you know what Apple are using their much reported data centers for?

As far as I can see, all the iCloud related stuff ends up in Cupertino/SJ.

~~~
mrb
The North Carolina facility is reportedly for iCloud. But construction was
barely completed, so it is probably not online yet.

