China's Inspur rumored to be joining Apple server supply chain
A Chinese server vendor, Inspur, has allegedly joined Apple's datacenter supply chain, as the iPhone maker continues to work toward bringing more of its cloud services in-house.
An Apple datacenter in Maiden, North Carolina.
Inspur is backed by the Chinese government, and a major player in the country's internet service server market, as noted by DigiTimes. Some of the company's existing clients are said to include Alibaba, Baidu, Microsoft, IBM, VMware, and Red Hat.
The firm also established an office in Apple's home state of California last year, including production, research, and development functions.
Despite owning data centers in places like North Carolina, Apple is still dependent on outside parties like Amazon and Microsoft for some of its cloud infrastructure. The company is moving towards self-sufficient infrastructure in an effort known as "Project McQueen," including purchases of land in Hong Kong and mainland China, which should house future datacenters.
The switch may make more financial sense for Apple than investing in third parties, but the company is also thought be worried about potential backdoors inserted somewhere along the supply chain, something that could be helped by exerting more control. Snooping could, however, still be a concern with a firm like Inspur, since the Chinese government regularly intercepts internet traffic.
An Apple datacenter in Maiden, North Carolina.
Inspur is backed by the Chinese government, and a major player in the country's internet service server market, as noted by DigiTimes. Some of the company's existing clients are said to include Alibaba, Baidu, Microsoft, IBM, VMware, and Red Hat.
The firm also established an office in Apple's home state of California last year, including production, research, and development functions.
Despite owning data centers in places like North Carolina, Apple is still dependent on outside parties like Amazon and Microsoft for some of its cloud infrastructure. The company is moving towards self-sufficient infrastructure in an effort known as "Project McQueen," including purchases of land in Hong Kong and mainland China, which should house future datacenters.
The switch may make more financial sense for Apple than investing in third parties, but the company is also thought be worried about potential backdoors inserted somewhere along the supply chain, something that could be helped by exerting more control. Snooping could, however, still be a concern with a firm like Inspur, since the Chinese government regularly intercepts internet traffic.
Comments
but maybe this would only be for servers in China. The Chinese government has stated last year, that all information about Chinese citizens, and I suppose, really, all traffic, needs to remain in China, somewhat like the EU has come up with in a new law. One might say, as these governments have said, that it's to prevent information about their people from ending up where it shouldn't be, out of the country.
but the real reason is that it's easier to monitor that information when the servers are physically within the territory. An additional reason is that, this way, if they want to, they can simply seize the server farms physically. They can't do that at all if they reside outside of their territory.
in that case, it doesn't matter where the servers come from.
it makes sense. One complaint they have been having with Amazon, is that their cloud is too slow. Apple also has been using Azure, and they're moving at least some functions from Amazon.
apple once before tried to buy Dropbox, and was spurned. I don't know what makes Thompson think it would go any better now, and Dropbox would be far more expensive at this point, and we know how Apple feels about expensive purchases. It would cost them less to built out by themselves. They can always hire the experienced people they need.
ALL iPhones are currently built in Chinese factories and Apple doesn't seem to be too concerned that the Chinese Gov't will install backdoors...
Those are likely all the reasons Apple didn't move forward with their own data centres in the past. The recent "War on Encryption" though, seems to have changed their tune... Regardless of the challenges that lay ahead, the only way to control your own data is to have complete control of it. MS was forced to "sell the farm" to the NSA years ago, and Apple knows it.
I would assume they are using Inspur's services only for their chinese customers, who's data is intercepted by the Chinese government anyway.
Wasn't there just an article about the wariness of American companies buying foreign servers due to stealth components soldered on the boards that connect directly to the Chinese NSA?
Seems fishy to me that Apple would be going down this route, unless they're going to build a special facility that tests every server like the one HAL uses to troubleshoot the AE-35 gyro unit.
but BUYING servers from an outside company is different. There is no guarantee that they would be able to tell is something was wrong.
Apple has been using Microsoft's Azure for some time, but not for everything, as they have split their business among several companies. They are moving more work from Amazon to Azure as we are writing this.
The big question is whether Apple designs its own ARM based server chip or purchases chips from Intel over the long term.
With apple's own CPU design team, TSMC's manufacturing prowess including their plans for developing a high performance 7 nm node and a potentially far lower cost, it would seem that Apple has all the pieces to produce their own high performance server chip, especially for use in their own data center.
Time will tell.
In modern commercial server environments it is all Linux. I have a friend who works at a 300,000 sq ft data center who tells me it is about 60% Windows and 40% Linux. Virtually 0 BSD and 0 OS X, hence the talent pool is very low to nonexistent which explains why almost no one decides to invest in those platforms even though technically they are viable. At the data center there is one guy that has a cabinet packed with Mac minis which are pretty much exclusively hosting church websites.
i met him when there was a major upgrade to the power distribution and UPS system and all the colo people had to be there to restart their systems after the upgrade. It was sort of a party atmosphere and even though cameras are prohibited it was like 3 o'clock in the morning and everyone was taking selfies with their cube mates who they had never met before..
this has been a problem with Apple ever since I've been involved with them in the late 1980's. They would come up with some hot product, and sit on it for ages.