Apple's Global Data Center Director dies at 41

The head of Apple's global data center operations Olivier Sanche died at the age of 41 of a heart attack last Thursday.

Olivier Sanche was well-known as a pioneer of data center efficiency technologies, who was appreciated for its way of thinking and eventually became a leader in planning and construction of data centers. Apple and the data industry in general were shocked by his loss.

Sanche started working at Apple in August, 2009 to manage the preparation for the new data center in North Carolina. Previously he had been working for eBay. Its Topaz center, situated in Utah, was built thanks to Sanche and because of its environmentally sustainable design the building was recently awarded a LEED Gold certification.

Sanche promoted the ideas of efficient, green, sustainable data centers, and concerned about not only energy consumption, but also, eWaste, water consumption and other environmental resources. Such an approach perfectly fits to Apple's rarely advertise though decisive strategy to bring environmentally sustainable balance in product design, packaging, transportation and construction.

Here is what one of his associates wrote in his note about Sanche:

"Olivier loved being at Apple as he could do things he could get done no where else. He had vision, passion, and drive to do the right thing, especially for the environment. One of the sadder parts is Olivier couldn’t talk about what he was doing at Apple, but we had many other data center things we could talk about without touching on any Apple topics."

According to Peter Openheimer, who is a chief financial officer at Apple, the data center that was built with the help of Sanche is going to be launched by the end of the 2010.