datacenter – TechVirtuoso

Apple discontinuing their Xserve lineup

November 5th, 2010 at 8:57 AM No Comments Michael Stanclift

Adding a bit of uncertainty to what exactly Apple is doing up in North Carolina with two (maybe three) datacenters, it’s now public on the Apple website that after January 31, 2011, you’ll no longer be able to purchase an Apple Xserve.

Maybe it’s because of the datacenters, that Apple cannot keep their own internal systems online and still sell the servers at retail? Doubtful. Apple is suggesting administrators transition over to either Mac Mini or Mac Pro based servers. Neither of which are particularly rack mount friendly.

It’s just hard to imagine Apple doing any sort of massive datacenter project and fill it with such inefficiently designed server systems, yet it’s equally hard to see an Apple datacenter with Dell or HP systems. I’m sure they have something interesting up their sleeves and maybe will be releasing a new server lineup down the road.

Just what the heck is Apple building in North Carolina?

October 27th, 2010 at 3:39 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

Yesterday and earlier today we talked about the construction going on near Apple’s massive 500,000 square foot datacenter, and what seems to be their plans to build an identically massive datacenter in the same 183 acre parcel of land. As it turns out, the fun may not stop there. Digital Daily has uncovered information from the Catawba County Geospatial Information Services, which indicates Apple also owns an slightly smaller yet also large (70 acre) parcel of land just across the street.

While this space could be used for anything from an office complex, to what Digital Daily jokes as “using it to build some Jobsian theme park” it could also be used to build a third datacenter full of shiny new XServes.

Apple better have some grand plan for their new cloud that is equally as impressive as the real estate and facilities they’ve been collecting. It is a bit concerning though that they seem to be focusing all their money and energy into the hills of Maiden, North Carolina. While it’s totally possible Apple has purchased equally huge tracts of land in other corners of the country (or globe) under the radar of the press, as it stands right now they’re putting all their data into one very large set of baskets in Tar Heel Country.

Apple looking at Thanksgiving to bring new NC datacenter online

October 27th, 2010 at 9:33 AM No Comments Michael Stanclift

There is a lot of speculation out there pointing that Apple will be using the Thanksgiving holiday to move their iTunes backend over to their new North Carolina datacenter. 148Apps.biz says that Apple will be locking developers out of their iTunes Connect accounts for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

In typical Apple super-secret fashion it’s unknown exactly what this datacenter is being used for. Apple could be locking developers out just because turtle-neck decided that they needed to spend more time with their families. However, as this is Apple’s first significant datacenter presence, and it’s generally expected to come online by the end of the year, chances are pretty good that the lockout is due to a massive data and routing migration.

The 500,000 square foot facility has cost Apple nearly a billion dollars, and they’ve already begun expanding.

Apple already planning to double the size of its North Carolina datacenter, adds second facility

October 25th, 2010 at 8:36 PM 3 Comments Michael Stanclift

Apple has been building a massive 500,000 square foot datacenter in Maden, North Carolina for the last year or so. Even though this datacenter is not even fully operational, Apple has already started work on another matching facility just behind the recently built one.

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HP Superdome Tech Day – 10 years in mission critical enterprise

October 5th, 2009 at 1:47 PM 1 Comment Shane Pitman

HP Superdome, the name “Superdome” alone invokes a sense of something enormous, powerful, and coming from HP, one can only envision a system at the top end of the power and capability scale. In fact, that’s just what the HP Superdome systems aim to be. For the last decade, HP has developed the Superdome platform to provide mission critical solutions for datacenter environments where down time can not only be costly but disastrous. HP Superdome provides the uptime demanded by services like emergency call centers, major financial centers, and online ordering systems, as well as mission critical infrastructures for major corporations around the world.

Over the last decade, HP has developed the Superdome platform to provide mainframe performance and stability. According to a 2008 Dataquest Insight survey, the cost of downtime within large organizations (2,500+ users) has jumped from $40,000 in 2005 as the average cost per hour of downtime of mission critical business systems to $128,000 in 2008, an increase of 120%. These same companies reported that the amount of downtime they had experienced during the 2005-2008 time frame had also increased 69%. With statistics like that, it becomes painfully obvious that IT downtime downtime directly affects the bottom line. Throughout the growth of the HP Superdome platform, features like redundant cell board components, double chip spare memory, and hot swap I/O have been developed to provide resiliency and to prevent downtime, all with the goal of providing near perfect availability.

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Upcoming HP Webcast: Delivering a Next Generation Data Center

August 12th, 2009 at 11:41 PM 4 Comments Shane Pitman

Continuing the “CIO Real Talk” webcast series, HP has announced the second event of the series, “Delivering a Next Generation Data Center.” The webcast is scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 13th, and will identify key data center transformation strategies and explore the role of technology in driving business growth, especially in the current economic environment. (more…)