back to article Apple poaches eBay data center guru

As it preps a $1bn data center in North Carolina, Apple has hired away eBay's senior director of data center services and strategy. According to Dave Ohara and his Green Data Center blog, eBay's Olivier Sanche will join Apple as its director of global data center operations. In early June, after the North Carolina lawmakers …

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  1. Billy 8
    Jobs Halo

    Spending 1bn...

    Couldn't it just be they're going to run it on apple hardware and it's actually just a half-dozen (very stylish) racks? ;-)

  2. Michael C

    You're WONDERING what they're doing?

    Apple has a MASSIVE data load to deal with. They're continuing to not only add content to iTunes, but they're also improving the resolution of that content, and the bandwidth requirements for delivering each file as well. Combine that with Apple's continuing movement into personal websites, information and file sharing, data backup, hosted services, and more, yea, they need a MASSIVE datacenter. Also the interconnections between iTunes and Twitter, facebook, etc likely has some significant server side presence, and expanding their server side role in the iPhone push technology is happening fast.

    Also, Apple probably could use a place to work on xGrid systems and massively parallel cluster applications and other cloud based services and application virtualization. Further, Apple is rumored to be working on both their own search engine as well as their own financial transaction system. A hulu-like product is also completely possible in the very near future.

    Just the physical storage pool for 1080p content covering every major movie and TV episode released in a calendar year is amazing, not to mention taking their more than a million song database and converting it all to lossless rips.

    I can't even imagine the aggregate switch capacity Apple needs, let alone the bandwidth costs. I would not doubt that of that billion, nearly a 100 million in in ISP connectivity over 3-5 years, and another 100million in switch hardware, before we talk structural and traditional server costs...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    shame

    so...what good is dropping this data centre into an economically deprived area? how many employees will it have or need? most server management can be done remotely anyway.

    as for the poaching - shame...as previously he's been providing loads of info for the rest

    of the community to digest and learn from....will Apple allow such freedom of knowledge transfer? I doubt it..they are now one of the least ethical companies around.

  4. Philip Cohen
    Happy

    An insider's expose of eBay?

    I'm more interested to see if Olivier Sanche will write an anonymous book (a pamphlet would do) about his experiences manipulating data at eBay, detailing, in particular, eBay's attitude to the crime of "shill" bidding, as it can be demonstrated that eBay knowingly facilitates such activity and when such activity is reported to them, they will cover it up, surely, a crime.

    How about that Oliver? You can use a pseunonym to get around that non-disclosure agreement. And in any case, that part of any contract that requires a party to not expose criminal activity, would be unenforceable at law.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Poaching?

    Is nobody allowed to leave a company unless it goes bankrupt or they get terminated?

  6. Bilgepipe
    Gates Horns

    @Anonymous Coward 21:09

    "so...what good is dropping this data centre into an economically deprived area?"

    This information is freely available if you take the time to search instead of just bleating. Last I read was over 100 employees at the site, plus other jobs in related areas outside.

    "[Apple] are now one of the least ethical companies around."

    Are you serious?

  7. Lionel Baden

    @AC

    cleaners, guards, local shops, power, local taxes, road infrastructure, receptionists .....

    seriously there is a really big list of people working in a data center and the effects it would cause

    You dont really think just IT hacks work in datacenters.

    you need at least 127 managers for a medium sized datacenter .... wait is that just the NHS ??

  8. Richard 102
    Pint

    @Shame

    "so...what good is dropping this data centre into an economically deprived area? how many employees will it have or need? most server management can be done remotely anyway."

    First, it must be better to have it than not. Second, western North Carolina is going to be cheaper than the Bay Area, New York City, etc.

    "they are now one of the least ethical companies around."

    Lighten up, Francis. Is "least ethical companies" like "least corrupt Chicago politician"? Woops, here come the Apache helicopters with "HOPE" on the side.

  9. P. Lee

    Spending 1bn...

    But would you rather have some stylish racks or MS Exchange CALs? ;)

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