(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Currently under construction in North Carolina, Apple’s massive, 500,000 square-foot data center has been the subject of rumors that it is being built for running new cloud-based applications.
According to Data Center Knowledge editor Rich Miller, the size of the data center hints that the North Carolina facility may serve a bigger purpose than to keep up with the rapid growth of iTunes, the iPhone App Store, MobileMe, and other online services.
“The most interesting question is whether Apple needs a much larger facility to support growth in its existing services, or is scaling up capacity for future offerings,” Miller said to the “Cult of Mac” blog in an interview, noting that at 500,000, it would be among the largest data centers in the world. “This would qualify as a big-ass data center.”
Wired magazine has noted that Apple’s iWork app was in need of real-time online collaboration tools, which would put it on par with Google Docs and the latest incarnation of Microsoft Office. A cloud computing data center would fill that hole, and more, so “[T]here still has to be something even bigger going on here…”
