DAILYHOSTNEWS, October 24, 2011 – Scott Noteboom, one of data center executives whose brainchild was the Yahoo! Computing Coop, has left Yahoo! for Apple, according to his LinkedIn profile. The update was first noted by GigaOm.
Noteboom had been VP of data center engineering and operations at Yahoo! since 2005. His professional title at Apple has not been specified, the LinkedIn profile saying only that he is a “distinguished gentleman” at the company.
Apple representatives did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
A recent Apple data center chief Olivier Sanche passed away in November, 2010. The company has not since publicly announced a replacement.
Noteboom was at the head of an infrastructure team at Yahoo! responsible for breakthrough innovations in data center design. The most recent and notable one was creation of the Computing Coop – a design that cut both energy consumption of the company’s large-scale data centers, as well as cost and time it takes to build them.
The first such coop went up in Lockport, New York. It was officially launched in September 2010.
The design allows a maximum amount of outside air to end up inside an air plenum inside the data center, where it is mixed to appropriate temperature and humidity with warm return air from the data center floor before being delivered to the IT equipment.
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Noteboom said in an interview that the building was positioned to leverage winds from the nearby Great Lakes, which in combination with the collective power of server fans and a few fans for air re-direction made air handlers unnecessary. When outside air is too warm, the adiabatic-cooling system kicks in, which is only used about 200 hours per year on average.
