Apple Begins Construction of iCloud Data Center

Apple is beginning construction on its new 338k square foot iCloud Data Center located in Prineville, Oregon. The facility is to be a ‘green’ data center and ultimately house 14 data halls at an estimated cost of a total between $250 Million to one Billion dollars upon final completion.

Aside from two local utility companies, Apple has tapped a number of renewable energy providers to feed electricity to the facility, including firms dealing in wind, hydro, and geothermal power.

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I'm having a hard time seeing how these companies are going to compete with cloud services. They want you to use it so they can datamine you but they have to get you to use it.

Right now the best services is Amazon, the iCloud is going to be very pleasing since it will incorporate iTunes services. This leaves SkyDrive with a steep hill to climb as they try to integrate services.

Another thing is these Clouds want to offer extravagant amounts of storage space to the end user which is only really useful for media for 99% of the users but at the same time its a horrible way to store and retrieve media.

I barely use the Cloud and would rather use my own services. The Cloud right now is a great way for me to store certain documents, with no personal data, for either backup or easy retrieval but I don't need 25+ gigs for that, hell even 5gigs isn't necessary.

I imagine MS is going to end up taking it all. They'll probably incorporate cloud crap into their OS's, Sharepoint, so on and so forth. Eventually saturating everyone with some kind of cloud service and ppl will slowly start swallowing it.

Bleah...cloud data centers. Skribbels do not at all like clouds from Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter. Well, I guess Office365 isn't too bad, but I'd never leave any personal stuff I think is important to me on something other than a device that I actually own. On the business enterprise side, I guess there's a cost savings aspect that companies are pushing, but in Apple's case they're just doing this for home users and aren't interested in competing in enterprise IT so I'm kinda not seeing the point. Even really low-end stuff like iPod/Pads have enough local storage to hold text documents and a photo collection. Maybe not a huge amount of video, but like Trimlock says, leaving that in someone's datacenter in who-knows-where and then streaming it over a network link is a stupid-face idea anyhow. Plus most videos aren't exactly necessary or important since they're generally entertainment we can all live without if we wanted.

krotch said:

I imagine MS is going to end up taking it all. They'll probably incorporate cloud crap into their OS's, Sharepoint, so on and so forth. Eventually saturating everyone with some kind of cloud service and ppl will slowly start swallowing it.

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SkyDrive will succeed easily in the enterprise area for workplace applications/documentation. The place where these companies are trying to compete is on the personal level. Everyone is clamoring to throw everything they have at the consumer in an attempt to get them to come over.

Whats going to seperate these guys? Uptime most likely.

Trimlock said:

SkyDrive will succeed easily in the enterprise area for workplace applications/documentation. The place where these companies are trying to compete is on the personal level. Everyone is clamoring to throw everything they have at the consumer in an attempt to get them to come over.

Whats going to seperate these guys? Uptime most likely.

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Probably no one will notice a difference in uptime unless it's quite a lot of downtime though. I don't really see SkyDrive making a big splash when its so easy to setup a file server that even small organizations can stick a cheapo, redundant NAS on their Linksys WRT-whatever router. I guess it might work when people travel around a lot, but not everyone does that.

SkyDrive is nice, now that they have an android app it's my primary cloud service for office documents. I keep my resume and spreadsheets of my finances that's about it. Nothing else I really need to put there as our office has it's own network.

I imagine all these consumer cloud providers will have 99.99999% uptime. Personally, I just jam my crap onto my webhost. Costs me $100 a year for unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. Don't see much downtime either.

Wonder who will be policing the content stored in these facilities? In this case I'd bet it will be Apple, as Microsoft has already announced it will be policing its own storage. Even so, I'll bet the RIAA/MPAA and its minions like the FBI will be scrutinizing these facilities with fine-toothed combs.

I don't have anything to hide, but I certainly do not want to take a chance on my "cloud" data getting rained all over by the FBI coming in with a warrant to shut down the facilities on suspicion that *somebody else* has sneaked some illegal material past the corporate sniffers!

Why would anyone do this when you can walk out and buy a terabyte of backup storage for < $100? For the really paranoid, put it all in waterproof, fireproof, crush-proof containers--like safes--and there you go--your data as physically safe as it could be anywhere, maybe safer, and free from prying corporate/government eyes. It's private property, and it's my private property, and I will treat it as such.

Besides consuming an inordinate amount of Internet bandwidth, these clouds are just bad ideas--examples of pure corporate gimmickry used mainly for publicity. Like in this particular case, you can bet your sweet bippy that when the sun goes behind the clouds and the wind dies down and the batteries (if they even use storage batteries) are low that Apple will be drawing its power straight from the commercial grid... It's shamelessly clever how they point out some of their power sources but manage not to mention all of them. "We're Green (Sometimes!)" is the way these headlines ought to read.

Companies like Steam or Gog, of course, are much, much different, as those companies control what is stored on their servers--not end users. They would not normally be targets for bored authorities with nothing else to do. If you value you privacy, leave the Apple and Microsoft clouds in the sky and roll your own at home.

Wonder if there is some percentage of "renewable" power you need to use to legally call yourself "green", I mean I could say "aside from the local utility company, I put a solar cell from a calculator on the roof, and now I'm running a green home!"

Bad mistake.

I know Apple is obsessed with rolling everything themselves, but Microsoft Azure (what they are currently hosting iCloud in) is a damn good platform. Stick with what you know works.

Just think, in 25 years people will look at you funny when you say " I keep all my storage on my desktop at home", akin to keeping your money in a coffee can buried in the backyard.

lilbabycat said:

Just think, in 25 years people will look at you funny when you say " I keep all my storage on my desktop at home", akin to keeping your money in a coffee can buried in the backyard.

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That may be true, but just because it's the norm won't mean it's the best solution for everyone. I don't fancy having all of my personal data subject to scrutiny of the powers on their every whim. The "if you don't have anything to hide" argument is meaningless when your data is subject to the perception of others who may not like something you wrote and dub you an enemy of the state or some other unexpected incident happens. Old "outdated" ideas aren't necessarily bad ideas, and in some instances are actually the better idea.