★ The Nitty Gritty on Apple’s New Server Farm Architecture

GigaOM ROCKED this report:

What’s certain is that Apple didn’t approach its iCloud infrastructure build with a light wallet or the mindset that it has to build its own gear and software like Google and Facebook have done. As Jobs said during his keynote, “It’s full of stuff. Full of expensive stuff.” Indeed, it cost Apple $500 $1 billion. Apple’s customers can complain about iCloud’s features, but it doesn’t look like they complain too much about Apple’s investment in the infrastructure that supports it.

What was interesting but not surprising is Apple doesn’t appear to have used any of their own server systems for this. I’m sure there are a few Xserves and Mac Pros laying around but the focus is not Mac OS X server or Apple hardware.

Apple has essentially killed Xserve so this isn’t surprising but, well a part of me wishes Apple would have rocked this with their own gear. Sigh.