The Apple Data Center FAQ, Part 2

We continue with The Apple Data Center FAQ

Is Apple Really Building A Second Data Center in Maiden?

Rumors of an expansion of the already huge Maiden project first appeared in the Charlotte Business Journal on Oct. 15 and were picked up by All Things Digital several days later. The Wagenseller video showed site work on adjacent property owned by Apple that could be a precursor to additional construction.

Apple’s building permits in Maiden are split between two addresses on the Apple property, one labeled “Dolphin Project” featuring applications filed in August and September of 2009, and another called “Dolphin Project 2″ with several permit applications in July and August of 2010 (permit links via AppleInsider).

Local officials say Apple’s plans indicate more than one building in Maiden. “Some of the drawings they submitted show a second structure of similar size on the site,” said Scott Millar, the director of economic development for Catawba County. Here’s a look at the original drawings, via the Catawba County Flickr feed.

Readers at MacRumors took the image and superimposed it over a Google Maps aerial image of the site to depict where the two facilities might be located on the property.

Is Apple Building Something Across the Street From its Data Center?

All Things Digital recently reported that Apple also bought 70 acres of land across from the land housing the data center, and noted some local rumors that it was for office space. “They have not indicated why they bought that additional property,” said Catawba County’s Millar. “That was never discussed.”

Satellite photos show that the land is currently covered with dense forest, so there will need to be considerable site preparation work before the property is ready for development.

What Technology Does Apple Use in Its Data Centers?

There are lots of folks wondering about Apple’s server strategy. In early November Apple said that it would discontinue its Xserve rackmount server. Apple has never been a major player in the server hardware market, so some analysts saw the decision to retire the lightly-sold Xserve as fitting with the company’s focus on consumer products. But it begs the question: what’s Apple running in its own data center?

The successor to the Xserve is the Mac Pro Server, which Apple says can surpass the performance of the Xserve. But the Mac Pro uses a tower form factor, which is far from ideal for data center operations, where space utilization is at a premium. Is Apple abandoning the data center business market? Is it using custom gear in the Maiden facility? See Pingdom and Apple Insider for additional review and analysis of Apple’s server strategy.

As for the technology being used within the North Carolina data center, here are some factoids gleaned from Apple’s job postings:

• Apple says that its “data center environment consists of MacOS X, IBM/AIX, Linux and SUN/Solaris systems.”
• The Maiden facility will have a “heavy emphasis” on high availability technologies, including IBM’s HACMP and HAGEO solutions for high-availability clusters, Veritas Cluster Server, and Oracle’s DataGuard and Real Application Clusters.
• Job candidates are also asked to be familiar with storage systems using IBM, NetApp and Data Domain, and data warehousing systems from Teradata.
• Networking positions require a familiarity with Brocade and Qlogic switches.

Facilities positions include no major surprises, requiring expertise in the maintenance and repair of chillers, cooling towers, heat exchangers, water treatment, pumps, and computer room air conditioning (CRAC) and air handling (CRAH) units. Applicants are asked to be familiar with building management systems, wiring of three-phase motors, and cooling systems using chilled water (meaning Apple won’t be going “chiller-less” to save energy, as Google and Microsoft have done).

Is Apple Building Data Centers to Deliver Cloud Services?

One of the most interesting question flowing from the North Carolina project is whether Apple needs a much larger facility to support growth in its existing services, or is scaling up capacity for future offerings. One of the leading theories about the size of the NC project is that Apple is planning future cloud computing services that will require lots of data center storage.

This fits neatly with Apple’s purchase last year of the streaming music service LaLa. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is planning to “reboot” its iTunes service as a browser-based service that would allow users to stream their music from anywhere. Others speculate that the recent video-enablement of iPods is meant to lay the groundwork for a more ambitious video offering. This shift in the iTunes model would mean a change in Apple’s data storage requirements – hence the huge scaling up of its data center platform.

The other possibility is that the East Coast data hub will support a major shift in Apple’s content delivery strategy. The company currently uses two leading content delivery networks (CDNs), Akamai Technologies and Limelight networks, to help deliver its content. A CDN can cut costs and improve performance by storing content closer to end users, reducing the volume of files that must traverse Internet backbones.

Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com, a leading expert in content delivery, wrote last year that Apple is planning to eventually shift its CDN operation in-house. “Apple still plans to bring much of their content delivery in house, which they have confirmed for me some time ago,” Rayburn said in an email last week, adding that the process may takes months or years to complete.  Rayburn notes that when Microsoft decided to build its own CDN network, it took another three years to shift 70 percent of the company’s content to in-house delivery. “That’s not to say that Apple could not do it much quicker … but they can’t do it overnight.”

What About Apple’s Other Data Centers?

An aerial view of the Apple data center in Newark, Calif. The company is said to be planning to add a major East Coast data center.

Apple operates a data center in Newark, California, which it acquired in 2006 for approximately $45 million, a significant discount to its construction cost. The facility was one of 23 identical data centers built in 2000-2001 for WorldCom’s web hosting business. WorldCom spent an estimated $110 million on each of the facilities. Apple acquired the property from an affiliate of Stream Realty Partners, the Dallas investment fund which scooped up multiple data centers at bargain prices during the depths of the data center glut of 2001-2004. The data center has 108,000 square feet of total space.

Apple also operates at least one data center on its corporate campus in Cupertino.

Will Apple Build More Data Centers?

It’s likely that Apple will build at least one other large data center complex to provide backup capabilities for the facility in North Carolina. Most major Internet companies have major hubs on both coasts, which helps with content delivery and also provides the ability to keep copies of critical data “out of region” so that a single natural disaster wouldn’t threaten the survival of the data.

A centrally hosted iTunes would create the potential for the Mother of All Downtime Events – a data center outage that leaves the world’s iTunes users unable to access their music. In terms of actual impact, an online music outage would rank low on most industry lists of worst-case data center failure scenarios. But an iTunes data center crash would be a huge public relations nightmare, generating a tidal wave of digital complaining via blogs and tweets.

A single point of failure will not suffice. If the speculation about Apple’s cloud ambitions are correct, there are more huge data centers to come.

Return to page one of The Apple Data Center FAQ.