Apple Data Centre Athenry = Middle of Nowhere.

Their Cork site isn't in the middle of nowhere nor is it badly connected. It's 4km from Patrick Street and connected via the 202 bus which has a 15 min frequency during the day and 30 min off peak.

EMC and VMware run private busses to the city centre, Apple may well do similar.

Apple also has space in the city centre.

The Apple site is no worse (actually a lot better) connected by public transport than most of Cork's outlying technology campuses and industrial parks.

That's more of an indictment of Bus Éireann than local planning too as Cork is actually pretty well organised and laid out compared to most Irish cities. Things are actually in clusters.

Data centres are like the internet's telephone exchanges. They're just a bland building full of racks of servers that needs relatively little on site intervention other than just normal maintenance.

Much of the network maintenance will be done in California or Cork or wherever apple have their network operations centre. It won't be in a data warehouse, that I can assure you!

They're a security risk so having them in a safe, out of the way location is preferable. Apple would probably prefer we all forget this facility exists.

(Telephone exchange location used to literally be a state secret for similar reasons)

They really just need a source of sustainable energy and in Ireland because of the climate they can pretty much passively cool.

The West of Ireland's wet, cool, non extreme weather is actually a huge selling point for data centres.

The knock on effect for the west of Ireland is in small scale job creation but the bigger one is that it will drive demand for fibre connectivity which actually means telcos pay more attention and Galway City and regional towns benefit from that in a big way as they'll see enhanced backhauled connection options.

Also data centres aren't a passing fad. They are if anything going to be growing at exponential rates as faster and ubiquitous mobile broadband and fixed line broadband means more and more powerful services are made available to mobile devices from a central location.

We're rapidly moving away from the PC era and into a centralised computing era again because the communications infrastructure is making it possible and there are things that can be done on huge centralised servers that can't ever be done on a local computer at anything like the same cost or efficiency.

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Manufacturing has being going east for the past couple of decades now, that won't change in the near future. As for call centres, some are returning to Ireland & UK due to there being too many customer complaints. Data centres can go anywhere, but there are preferred locations that have reliable power & a temperate climate and most importantly, reliable staff nearby and a secure location.

Ping time also is a *huge* deal. You don't want data centres at huge distances from markets. Ireland will predominantly be serving the UK and Northern Europe because we're extreme well connected by diverse fibre routes.

Having your data centres in India wouldn't make a lot of sense, even by fibre connectivity.

Countries like Ireland have a major advantage in being cool, wet, very safe and having a sustainable energy policies and very good international connectivity.

Apple could easily site further centres elsewhere even on their Cork Campus without any fanfare.

These companies keep that infrastructure as low key as they possibly can and its regularly shrouded in secrecy.

It won't be a major employer, but it is good for the region due to knock on benefits, especially in terms of fibre connectivity demands.

I agree, the change in technology is unlikely to make data centres unnecessary, smaller more powerful servers and smaller more compact memory just means even more powerful data centres and more and more intelligent services.

This is the kind of mega computing infrastructure that will probably ultimately end up hosting AI the way things are headed with intelligent search etc etc

I do think though ultimately, you'll see a much bigger use of small and media data centres closer to markets. As power goes up, getting ping times down will matter more and more.

So, I think you'll probably eventually have big specialised super nodes and mirroring and rapid access services located in nearly telephone exchange type locations cross connected and peered with local ISPs

The latency through Britian could be anything ... They're known to packet sniff.