Apple to produce data center cabinets at defunct GT Advanced sapphire plant

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 35
    yojimbo007yojimbo007 Posts: 1,165member
    macxpress said:
    How about Making  your own casing for Apple display too... so people wont have to flash the competition's logos on their monitors  where Apple products are used. ....
    Give it rest already...jesus!
    Give what a rest ? Apples stupid decisions? Look the other way? What are u suggesting?
  • Reply 22 of 35
    Rayz2016Rayz2016 Posts: 6,957member
    macxpress said:
    How about Making  your own casing for Apple display too... so people wont have to flash the competition's logos on their monitors  where Apple products are used. ....
    Give it rest already...jesus!
    Give what a rest ? Apples stupid decisions? Look the other way? What are u suggesting?
    Move to another platform?
    macxpressai46StrangeDaysjroy
  • Reply 23 of 35
    misamisa Posts: 827member
    williamh said:
    > "...concerned that tampering in third-party products -- for instance by spy agencies -- could create serious vulnerabilities."

    I'd like to think this concern is unjustified paranoia... but maybe not.

    Not unjustified paranoia. I'll make a long story short.  Bought a Cisco switch for work from a company in New York.  The inner packaging indicated it started in Australia and shipped through Hong Kong before it got to me, which was weird. A colleague who is a kind of uptight IT auditor (great guy, but facts are facts) asked me how I knew it was genuine.  Based on the weirdness of the shipping, I answered that I don't know that it's genuine.  Everything looked just perfect, the switch, all the manuals, Cisco magnet pad thing, etc.  We never powered it on.  I contacted Cisco and eventually got to someone who asked for chassis serial numbers (on the logic board, not on the outside of the unit).  Cisco said they had no manufacturing record of it. It was fake. The FBI came over to my office. We wound up turning it over to them. 
    That's actually quite interesting, but also consider that you maybe bought it from someone who sourced it from Hong Kong, which is where quite a bit of counterfeit stuff gets from mainland China into the domestic shipping chain. Anytime you see "drop ship" businesses on eBay and such, this is exactly what they are doing. eg you order from X English-speaking company, typically Canada, UK or Australia, they turn around and call their drop shippers in HK, and they just find one and send it.

    Your business may not have been a target of the counterfeit, but whomever you sourced it from should have their ass kicked for it.
    jroy
  • Reply 24 of 35
    k2kwk2kw Posts: 2,075member
    karmadave said:
    blastdoor said:
    Does anybody know what processors and OS Apple uses on the servers they assemble for themselves?
    They use Intel processors and Linux on most of their iCloud servers including the ones they source directly from ODM's...
    Are they using the same old processors in the Mac Pro or one of the new higher core Intel processors that have been released in the last 3 years?
  • Reply 25 of 35
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    macxpress said:
    How about Making  your own casing for Apple display too... so people wont have to flash the competition's logos on their monitors  where Apple products are used. ....
    Give it rest already...jesus!
    Give what a rest ? Apples stupid decisions? Look the other way? What are u suggesting?
    What makes Apple's decision stupid? Please explain...I'd love to hear the BS whining you're about the type.

    Is it because you can't have a display with a fancy bezel on it with an Apple logo on the back of it? There's nothing entirely special about Apple's displays. They're entirely over priced for one thing. Its just someone else's panel in a fancy bezel. I can't imagine a lot of users actually purchased a display with their Mac since most Macs already have a display, or they already have a display to use with their Mac. So why would Apple put all kinds of money and time into something very little purchase? Why reinvent what someone else is already doing when they can focus on other things that are far more important?
    StrangeDays
  • Reply 26 of 35
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    k2kw said:
    Its alive.    Xserve lives
    HA! Don't get your hopes up. Nobody bought the first or second iteration...this isn't going to magically change. 
    Soli
  • Reply 27 of 35
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    I hope cabinet is just a stand-in term for an open rack by which their servers connect. The most efficient way to cool a vast number of servers producing a lot of heat isn't to isolate them in cabinets but keep them completely open with the entire room being hermetically sealed so that only cold air filtered through massive HEPA filters is recycled into the room. Even the servers themselves should be barebones without fancy casing outside of the framing to hold the components in place.
    SpamSandwich
  • Reply 28 of 35
    fracfrac Posts: 480member
    Soli said:
    I hope cabinet is just a stand-in term for an open rack by which their servers connect. The most efficient way to cool a vast number of servers producing a lot of heat isn't to isolate them in cabinets but keep them completely open with the entire room being hermetically sealed so that only cold air filtered through massive HEPA filters is recycled into the room. Even the servers themselves should be barebones without fancy casing outside of the framing to hold the components in place.
    Actually, targeted and channelled localised cooling is much more efficient. Moving large volumes of air otherwise not critical is massively expensive and may well result in overheating other components. 
    ai46
  • Reply 29 of 35
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    jblongz said:
    GTAT...wasted my money in stock options.
    I'm a member of that club too!
  • Reply 30 of 35
    mattinoz said:
    mtbnut said:
    polymnia said:
    mtbnut said:
    I wish they'd put in more money to fix the code that runs on the servers that are housed in said cabinets. (But, hey, the cabinets will surely have nice Jony Ive-approved chamfered corners, properly leaded fonts above the artisanal pixie tube indicator lamps, and Corinthian leather bezels, I'm sure.) 

    Loading up Gmail takes about 5-9 seconds; iCloud Mail takes about 20-30 seconds. I don't even bother browsing my photo library using iCloud Photos; what a lethargic POS. Google Photos? A luxurious, snappy breeze to use. 

    Apple is so far behind in the cloud game it's embarrassing. 
    So they get a free manufacturing facility as collateral from their busted investment. Now you want them to somehow turn that asset into code debugging?

    Not to say your complaint isn't valid, but you pick an odd article on which to point it out.

    Is there some other problem you have with Apple that a free manufacturing facility might help solve?
    The factory is free. What will happen within it isn't. That money should be used for code debugging. I pay a monthly fee for iCloud, and it shouldn't be used to pay for bespoke cabinets. 
    Bespoke cabinets? Sorry, where did the idea they are designing their own cabinets come from?
    Although I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't start contributing to Open Compute Project and using that sorts of rack and hardware.

    It reads more like they will be fitting all the hardware into the cabinets, wiring it up, testing then wrapping them up to send out to other data centres as they build out the capacity globally.  So that a small team of trained people all work in the same location and are the only ones who ever touch the equipment in the racks.

    Also sounds like they will have this centre as a back to base to call in to for maintenance and monitoring. Still, they could well station all staff working on server software and rumoured custom hardware here so all these teams can bounce off each other.
    Agree. The whole thing sounded fishy. Making their own cabinets for security reasons? This is a server factory. 
  • Reply 31 of 35
    aaarrrggghaaarrrgggh Posts: 1,609member
    Typically this is an integrator role-- you build 4'x8'x8' (ish) multi-cabinet chassis and get all of the internal wiring finalized along with installing the servers.  As their data centers grow, the rack and stack rooms likely need to be dedicated to maintenance rather than rollout.

    It is pretty cool seeing one of these blocks air-skidded across a data center floor; I think I saw a shipping container unloaded and running with 40 rack equivalents in about 2 hours.  A lot easier than racking 1,400 servers on site...
  • Reply 32 of 35
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    To all those moaning about Apple's cloud services I'd say I think, in my experience at least, they have improved dramatically of late.  I just emailed a friend in the UK a 2 GIG video file using nothing but Apple Mail.  The new auto FTP system picked it up and uploaded in parallel with the email.   It was very fast and my friend was able to simply click the icon in the email and download it seamlessly.  That is some pretty clever 'behind the scenes' technology most users wont even realize is happening.  Meanwhile the speed Photos now syncs has increased a lot for me.  I tried endless other systems for cloud photo storage and all promised the earth but were both slow and dreadful interfaces.  
  • Reply 33 of 35
    polymniapolymnia Posts: 1,080member
    mtbnut said:
    polymnia said:
    mtbnut said:
    I wish they'd put in more money to fix the code that runs on the servers that are housed in said cabinets. (But, hey, the cabinets will surely have nice Jony Ive-approved chamfered corners, properly leaded fonts above the artisanal pixie tube indicator lamps, and Corinthian leather bezels, I'm sure.) 

    Loading up Gmail takes about 5-9 seconds; iCloud Mail takes about 20-30 seconds. I don't even bother browsing my photo library using iCloud Photos; what a lethargic POS. Google Photos? A luxurious, snappy breeze to use. 

    Apple is so far behind in the cloud game it's embarrassing. 
    So they get a free manufacturing facility as collateral from their busted investment. Now you want them to somehow turn that asset into code debugging?

    Not to say your complaint isn't valid, but you pick an odd article on which to point it out.

    Is there some other problem you have with Apple that a free manufacturing facility might help solve?
    The factory is free. What will happen within it isn't. That money should be used for code debugging. I pay a monthly fee for iCloud, and it shouldn't be used to pay for bespoke cabinets. 
    Got it. You have an axe to grind.

    Enjoy being angry.
    StrangeDaysjroy
  • Reply 34 of 35
    StrangeDaysStrangeDays Posts: 12,834member
    macxpress said:
    How about Making  your own casing for Apple display too... so people wont have to flash the competition's logos on their monitors  where Apple products are used. ....
    Give it rest already...jesus!
    Give what a rest ? Apples stupid decisions? Look the other way? What are u suggesting?
    So because you don't like the decision, despite being ignorant about why it was made, that decision is....stupid? Hmm. Yeah I don't think so,
    jroy
  • Reply 35 of 35
    xServe - all new but twice as thin.
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