During the WWDC “Stevenote” we got a rare glimpse into the mysterious Apple North Carolina data center. Two shots have been seen online so far: One showing showing swoopy Teradata racks and another open, exposing HP rack servers and what looks like a NetApp array. Since Apple spent billions building out this datacenter, and has kept their product choices very quiet, it’s amusing to try to suss out what they are using from their own promo video.

In the first photo, we have rows of swoopy racks – at least 30 are pictured. These appear to be Teradata Extreme Data Appliance racks. The gray color and funky doors give them away. The second photo includes a 1U rack server with six 2.5″ drives featuring “HP purple” drive eject buttons. There are over 100 in this photo, receding to infinity. Looks like HP ProLiant DL360 G7 servers to me. We also have a 2U rack server with 16 2.5″ drive bays. I count over 20 of these. They don’t quite look like HP to me, but could be high-density HP DL380 G7 servers. What looks like a NetApp FAS6200 to me is at the lower right. It looks to be 6U high, compared to the shelves. We also have a number of disk shelves for the NetApp. I’m guessing NetApp DS2246 shelves. In this third shot, we see more HP 1U servers, possibly ProLiant DL360 G7’s as noted above. We have another NetApp filer “head” similar to the one in the second shot. Some sort of 6U beige rackmount device is found in the bottom of two racks We have many more NetApp disk shelves or 1U servers above

Note that these racks contain many 1U Chatsworth “HotLok” filler panels. They’re not very efficiently racked, but perhaps this was due to flexibility or power requirements…

Stephen’s Stance

Whatever Apple bought for this datacenter, they bought a lot of it. Just the hint that they purchased Isilon bumped parent company EMC’s stock a few months back. I imagine Teradata and NetApp might see similar bumps from these images!

It’s also interesting to speculate on the political implications of Apple’s datacenter buys. Would they still buy HP equipment, now that Palm and WebOS are re-emerging as iOS-killer contenders? Would Jobs’ friendship with Larry Ellison indicate a proclivity to buy Oracle or Pillar Data? Maybe the Apple/Cisco DÃ©tente would suggest UCS or even EMC? And what about that rumored Isilon buy. Was that displaced by Teradata and NetApp?

Images from MacRumors.com

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