Spy Plane Snaps Picture of Apple's Mystery Data Center

According to Wired, A spy plane has taken a picture of Apple's iCloud data center and provides plenty of room for speculation what Apple could be building on the site.

There was a time when a data center was just a single large building resembling a storage facility. As technology gets more complex and the requirements are changing, data centers are becoming much more complex - not just on the inside, but on the outside as well. Proof comes courtesy of Wired, which apparently has access to the owner of a 1949 banana yellow/sky blue Piper PA-11 Cub Special that is used as a spy plane to observe the construction at the North Carolina plant.

According to the picture, Apple has been busy. There is huge 100 acre solar facility that is promised to deliver 20 megawatts of power. A 21,000 square foot supporting ("tactical") data center now complements the 500,000 square foot data center that basically represents Apple's iCloud. Additional construction sites suggest that there is now a substation and Apple may be building a 20,000 square foot, 4.8 megawatt biogas plant.

There is a good chance that Apple will be operating the facility as a self-sufficient data center model. As much as an eye-sore it is, this could be an example how data centers should be built and run, given the monstrous power consumption of these facilities.

Source: Wired

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

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