Apple is looking for a Solaris systems engineer with five years or more of experience who can primarily support Oracle/Sun servers, with a secondary focus on supporting IBM/AIX servers, according to the for the job. Solaris and AIX are both based on Unix.

"Data center environment consists of Mac OS X, IBM/AIX and Sun/Solaris systems," says the job entry, which is posted for Maiden. Apple has invested US$500 million into the Maiden data center, which opened last year and is one of the backbones for Apple's iCloud online service.

Little is known about the hardware used in the data center, which is mostly known for its use of renewable energy. The company wants to run the Maiden facility on a higher percentage of renewable energy, the U.S.' "largest end user-owned solar array" and the "largest non-utility fuel cell installation" in the U.S.

Apple does not offer its own server. The company in , and switched over to the Mac Pro workstation as a server alternative, which is based on an aging design but was recently updated with new processors.

With the IBM servers, Apple may have reestablished a relationship with processors based on Power architecture, which were used in Apple computers until 2005 until the company switched over to Intel's x86 chips. IBM offers the Unix-based AIX OS on servers with Power processors, which are also used in some of the world's fastest computers. The world's fastest supercomputer, the Sequoia BlueGene/Q at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a Power processor and the Linux OS.