In recent months, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all embarked on building new datacentres. While the companies have been discreet about their plans, the push into datacentres makes perfect sense, as they plan to invest heavily in web-based services over the next decade.
More surprising are reports that Apple is about to break ground on a datacentre bigger than the behemoths being built by Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
To understand why this move would make sense for Apple, we look at what the reports say about the new Apple datacentre in North Carolina, and suggest ideas about what the company might be planning to do with it.
Apple's east-coast IT hub
On his Cult of the Mac blog, Wired News editor Leander Kahney interviewed Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, about Apple's big plans in North Carolina. Here is what we know so far:
- Location: Town of Maiden in western North Carolina, 40m north-west of Charlotte
- Size: 500,000 sq ft on roughly 200 acres
- Purpose: Will serve ostensibly as Apple's east-coast IT hub, with its west-coast hub in Newark, California (109,000 sq ft)
- Timing: Bulldozers expected to break ground in mid-August
- Cost: $1bn (£606m) over 10 years
- Staff: Fifty full-time employees
- Bandwidth: Dual-fibre lines
- Cost of electricity: $0.04-0.05 per KW hour from Duke Energy — versus $0.07-0.12 per KW hour in California;
- Alternate location: Virginia lost the bidding war with North Carolina over tax breaks and electricity costs
Miller said: "The early site plans indicate Apple is planning about 500,000 sq ft of datacentre space in a single building. That would place it among the largest datacentres in the world.
"For comparison purposes, Apple's existing datacentre in Newark, California is a little more than 100,000 sq ft. Most new standalone enterprise datacentres are in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 sq ft, so this would qualify as a big-ass datacentre."
The only other datacentres that exist on this scale are Microsoft's new Chicago datacentre, Phoenix ONE and SuperNAP in Las Vegas. All three have a little over 400,000 sq ft of space dedicated to datacentre use.
Miller added: "The companies that are building the biggest datacentres tend to also have the biggest cloud ambitions."
An Apple-shaped cloud?
The natural question is: what does Apple plan to do with all this datacentre space?
The fact the new datacentre is likely to be five times larger than Apple's west-coast counterpart is curious. It makes sense for Apple to have bi-coastal datacentre redundancy and to plan for growth in its online services (MobileMe, App Store, iTunes Music Store). But that alone will not consume enough storage and server cycles to justify a tripling or quadrupling of its datacentre capacity.
So a build-out with this kind of scale suggests Apple has bigger plans in the works.
Here are what are considered the most logical possibilities:
Video library expansion
Apple has begun renting and selling movies and TV shows on-demand via iTunes. The online rental business is set to explode over the next five years, so Apple probably sees a ton of opportunity here.
However, video is a resource hog in storage and CPU cycles, so a significant upgrade in capacity would make sense if Apple is moving in this direction.
Online document storage
With iDisk and MobileMe, Apple has dabbled in online storage for end users.
Google is expected to blow this open any day now (and has been for years), but Apple may see an opportunity to provide Macs, iPods and iPhones with some basic online storage capability (with the option to purchase more) to greatly simplify storage, transfers and backups for users.
This could also come into play with the long-rumoured Apple tablet, which would be likely to have minimal local storage and might need a cloud storage option for archiving a library of songs, videos or files.
Web-based software suites
Most web-based applications are still very rudimentary. However, there are signs that more powerful apps are coming.
Adobe's online version of Photoshop is slick. The forthcoming web version of Microsoft Office is very powerful. However, with advanced JavaScript and Ajax, tools are now available for more sophisticated cloud-based apps.
For Apple, this could mean its iLife and iWork suites could be turned into web-based applications that expand beyond the Mac — and even beyond the PC to smartphones.
Digital library build-out
One of the possibilities for Apple's rumoured tablet is that it is meant to be primarily a reading device for websites, blogs, magazines and books.
If that is the case, Apple could be preparing for a massive build-out of a digital-content library that it would peddle through iTunes. In some ways, this has already started, with books and magazines being sold through the iPhone App Store thanks to new capabilities in the iPhone 3.0 software.
The most likely scenario is video expansion. However, the digital library build-out would be the most revolutionary concept, so this could be the shiny object that Apple is chasing.
Talkback
I would have thought that they would apply all of the above proportionally across the hardware as the demands gradually fluctuate and grow or demise in the relevant service areas.