

First Look: Apple's Massive iDataCenter - 1SockChuck
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/02/22/first-look-apples-massive-idatacenter/

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altano
"with most speculation focusing on a shift of iTunes user libraries from user
desktops to online storage"

Yeah right, they can't even make MobileMe work despite people inexplicably
throwing gobs of money at them to do just that. How many years have they had
to fix that garbage? Although I guess they don't need to when the expectations
are so low: the last satisfied customer I talked to said "It works perfectly,
other than occasionally deleting all my contacts."

(I say this as someone who's given .Mac and MobileMe one shot each and almost
shot myself in the face as a result)

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arfrank
That is unless they start acquiring companies with the talent they want to
build a cloud experience that really works. They have acquired multiple
companies to build out a suite of products in the past,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple#Acquisitions).
That being said this might be how they start utilizing their recent purchase
of lala.com and they might be looking forward to complete the iLife suite on
the web.

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mortenjorck
Google makes a vertically-integrated smartphone, Apple builds a massive
datacenter.

I think the upshot here is simple: It's on.

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maximilian
I wouldn't really call it "vertically integrated". HTC made it. Sure google
told them what to make, and I guess you could say apple tells foxconn what to
make, but I feel like google just said, "Make us a sweet, thin, keyboardless,
phone, with these properties."

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keltex
I'll be curious if they end up using their shiny Xserve servers (starting at
$3K retail) or they end up using cheaper ones.

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mortenjorck
I'm kind of guessing Apple can get them at cost.

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markkanof
While that's true, it might be interesting to see if they end up making any
changes to thier Xserve product line based things they learn while using them
in a massive data center.

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mos1
How much square footage does one really need to support iTunes in the cloud?

I suppose their market share puts some pretty heavy demands on scalability,
but a 500k sf datacenter is a _lot_ of datacenter, and storage is fairly dense
these days.

Add to that the fact that music files deduplicate _very_ well across millions
of people and I'm left wondering if they're doing photos and video too, or
something else altogether, or if my back of the envelope estimates of the
square footage requirements for such a service are just way off.

