I’m not an expert in the area of CDNs nor the means by which companies such as Apple store and distribute content - everything from software upgrades to music, movies and apps.

I have been reading about the much-written-about data center in North Carolina that reportedly Apple will soon be announcing. Here are some questions for our members more knowledgeable about the technology and economics involved in data centers:

Will this reportedly $1 billion facility reduces Apple’s need for services from companies such as Akamai? In other words, are cost savings available from creating massive storage and distribution capacity through a reduction in expenses generated for outside distribution services?

There must be an overriding cost consideration in developing a sprawling data center on the east coast. It there also geographic benefit to locating a data center closer to the high-density population centers of the east coast rather than relying on west coast centers? In other words, will traffic from east coast areas be routed to North Carolina versus servers at other locations to reduce the number of hops between request and fulfillment?

Can Apple make use of its own server products in the data center thus consuming some of its own manufacturing output rather than purchasing servers from other vendors?

Apple must be expecting a huge and continuing increase in demand to commit to building and maintaining a huge data center. Should this commitment be viewed as a bullish sign Apple expects a continuing and consistent ramp in demand over the next decade for music, movies, apps and whatever else might be served up from a center in North Carolina?

Or is it as much an issue of Apple desiring to control the distribution process and reduce vulnerabilities created by contracting with other firms?

Thanks for the responses. I have no knowledge in these areas.

So far no responses. Any of our members have knowledge in this area?

I don’t believe that this means Apple can stop using Akamai as they provide caching of data at various places around the world.

As for using their own servers, I believe Apple already does, but at the core is a mainframe which feeds the XServes.

I imagine that this new data center will provide additional redundancy and resilience to events affecting a region such as the west coast (eg earthquakes).

Requests will likely be load-balanced across the various Apple data centers, so not all east coast requests will go to the new center, and not all west coast requests will go to the ones on the west coast. It all comes down to demand and how it is distributed.

The way I see it, serving media is still very much a growing part of Apple’s business and this new data center is all part of planning for future capacity and redundancy requirements.

It is an interesting development for sure.  I am no expert on data centers, but The new North Carolina facility will be nearly five times the size of the 109,000 square foot Newark, Calif. data center Apple bought in 2006 to support its growing infrastructure. Apple also operates a data center on its Cupertino, Calif. campus, and has used content delivery networks from Akamai (AKAM) and Limelight Networks (LLNW) to distribute content to users around the globe.  Google has about 19 data centers in the US and I think Microsoft has at least 4 or 5.  The obvious use is to support internet infrastructure and cloud based services.  Which to me means Apple will expand it’s cloud initiatives or go it alone as a mobile virtual operator.  We live in interesting times.