Apple plans to integrate its data centers using high-speed network

With the growing popularity of Apple products, including both mobile devices and services, the load on the company's data centers is also constantly increasing. Now the company depends on traditional providers and equipment suppliers in terms of support services iTunes, iCloud, Siri and others. At the same time, the corporation plans to expand its data centers, increasing their productivity, and also to merge these objects using a high-speed network.



The main task here is the creation of an advanced cloud infrastructure. Apple is going to invest billions of dollars in this project, while last year $ 1 billion was spent on expanding existing and creating new data centers. What are the intermediate steps to be completed during the implementation of such a large-scale project?

Internet services

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Accelerating the delivery of content to consumers by creating a high-speed network that will unite the company's American data centers is one of the main steps. Apple hopes to deliver content on its own, at least in some regions, eliminating the need to work with intermediary providers.



Now the largest Apple data centers are located in California, Nevada, Northern California and Oregon. The corporation is now looking for the ability to transfer data at a speed of hundreds of gigabits per second over fiber between these objects using its own solutions.

All on their own

Analytical company Raymond James Financial Inc. recently presented information about the results of Apple on the development of its own network infrastructure. So, Apple has been rebuilding its own data centers for the last five years, and now the productive structure companies need more than ever before.



Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook Inc. They are also spending billions of dollars on creating new types of network equipment for data centers and the data centers themselves. Apple also participates in many such projects, all with the same goal - to achieve maximum performance of their services and software solutions.



According to Frank Frankovski, head of the Open Compute Project Foundation, all telecommunications giants would like to become the central object of the modern digital world. But in this case, companies have to equalize the costs of deploying their infrastructure in order to be competitive.

Data centers

Previously, Apple data centers were filled with equipment manufactured by Hewlett-Packard Co., Cisco Systems Inc., NetApp Inc. The last two years, the corporation has been negotiating with some technology companies, planning to involve them in developing their own solutions. In March, Apple joined the Open Compute Project, which allows it to begin work on such solutions based on project standards.







The goal is not to replace all the equipment in existing data centers. The main task of the corporation is to install equipment developed independently, in data centers designed by its own engineers. Earlier this year, Apple announced plans to invest about $ 3.9 billion to create new facilities in Arizona, Ireland and Denmark.

Content delivery

Apple received about 9.9% of revenue last year from sales on iTunes and other services. This is a fairly significant share of the company's revenue, so Apple plans to improve the content delivery process.



To this end, the company is exploring the possibility of combining its data centers and network infrastructure into a single high-performance automated system. Facebook, which was able to build a similar infrastructure, saved about $ 2 billion thanks to this automation. Servers of the company are used on request , especially those that work as a “cold storage” system.



Experts believe that Apple is taking the right steps towards developing its own powerful cloud infrastructure. “If you use someone’s networks and data centers, you cannot control everything. You can hardly call Amazon and tell the company to increase channel capacity on Friday night three times to deliver your content, ”said Steve Harrison, vice president of marketing for Pica8 Inc.