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Facebook May Make Tiny Town a Data Center Mecca
miller60 writes "Just weeks after the opening of a Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon, local officials say two more companies may build server farms in the small town. Facebook has touted Prineville as an ideal environment for using fresh air to cool servers. The news positions Prineville (pop. 10,000, unemployment rate 17 percent) to emerge as a data center hub similar to Quincy, Washington, a small farm town that now hosts five huge server farms."
This sort of thing has happened in many other industries in many other places many times over. It's rarely the natives who get the jobs. Rather, it's experts and technicians from other regions who are brought in to do the specialized work. The natives who support these new arrivals may benefit, but the unemployed often remain unemployed.
You mean this Tiny Town?
Interesting place. It's at the confluence of two rather steep rivers. I imagine there's a decent amount of hydroelectric available. Very much a small town. There was an attendant at the gas station. I remember seeing lots of well-maintained public infrastructure. The whole place had sort of a creepy Stepford Wives feel. 17% unemployment makes me wonder what the deal is.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Actually it's sort of worse with datacenters in the fact they're large facilities but they produce very, very few local jobs. Most of the work is being done offsite over the internet or is completely automated.
A small town that hosts server farms for Facebook.
They should rename it "Farmville."
Not directly, no. But people who do get teh jobz will move nearer their work. This will create additional jobs, as they must eat, drink, and shit nearby, particularly now due to the gas prices that we all enjoy.
I didn't see anything in TFA about tax breaks given, and am curious whether anyone knows whether that happened, and how much.
Sorry, buddy, for Michigan's conditions only the relocation of the NYSE would help.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Data centers don't really provide many jobs at all - local or otherwise. After the location is built out it's basically a skeleton staff to keep the servers physically repaired.
On the plus side, datacenters are a touch water and power heavy; but aren't particularly noisy, noxious, or dangerous.
What you have to watch out for is situations where state or local governments end up offering ludicrously generous "incentive" packages that the locals will still be eating in taxes long after the industry in question has moved on(datacenters not exactly being a business where deep roots in the community help much, so they can and will pack up and move if you try to buy them in with 'incentives').
You can forget reviving the dreams of your blue collar workforce or such; but a datacenter should be a reasonably quiet, unassuming producer of modest taxes and a few support jobs. Just don't get sucked into a bidding war to host one...
Do all packets have to be routed through it five times a day?
Here's a real-life example - despite the objection of many retired veterans and other anti-mercenary citizens living in the area, the county government crookedly rubber-stamped a new facility of a Blackwater shell corporation, Wind-Zero. Yeah, look at that again - You have a racetrack, hotel, and an artillery range...a noisy, dirty Disneyland for law enforcement(artillery and helicopter noise pollution affecting vets who chose to retire in what they thought were gonna be quiet neighborhoods, and lead pollution affecting the wilderness and water table) Another method to funnel tax dollars for law enforcement "training" into corrupt private hands.
They say it will bring jobs. All of us know that's bullshit. They will bring in specialists from other counties, states, and countries. The expendables will be hired from nearby Mexicali(local businesses, especially agriculture, also choose to hire from Mexicali despite the county's ~30% unemployment rate), at minimum wage.
If you concerned citizens of America want to know where your country's headed, look no further than California's Imperial Valley. The most jobless county in the blingiest state.
The article:
Prineville (pop. 10,000, unemployment rate 17 percent)
See above, we have 167,000 population with ~30% unemployment.
While the cool air may be better for cooling the data enters, surely it would make even better sense to pipe that excess heat to local buildings. On the one hand the datacenter would be saving on heating costs and on the other hand the local buildings would save on heating costs.
The problem we have today is all too often buildings are seen as individual entities, instead of something that needs to fit into the local environment.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Well, as it turns out, every year we are able to do a whole lot of things more efficiently with fewer workers which means more people are competing for the remaining jobs.
Of course, as a society we are also counteracting this in various ways but we're still unlikely to ever return to the "golden days" of the years between just after WW2 up to somewhere around the early to mid-70s when a single person could support an entire family's middle-class lifestyle and jobs were not just plentiful but as my dad put it "If we didn't like the job we'd just quit and get a job at the place down the street the next day" (When I was fresh out of college and looking for work he couldn't comprehend how it could be hard for someone with a college education to find a job, when he was that age there were plenty of jobs available, many of these with clear career paths).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Every engineer and technician that moves into that town will need housing, food, retail, education, financial services, utilities, health services, and thousands of other necessities. That mean more business for the local businesses and thus more employment.
good luck at finding most of those in Prineville.
Town better start writing some zoning regulation laws. The very thing the fresh air is attracting will attract more things which will attract more things which will take the fresh air away. That's not even considering the potential of the then thriving server farm industry driven economy tanking if those server farms pull out to go to fresher air, causing a cascading effect of failing businesses and massive job losses..... But then again I'm one of those "worst case scenario" kind of persons.
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
People don't stay. Those that can often leave. It may not be as pretty but you can find a job in Portland a
lot easier.
The businesses are rarely concerned with giving jobs to the natives. They're far more concerned with talking employees into lower wages due to the lower cost of living and finding an area far enough away from peer-level jobs to make it hard for employees to leave once hired. (See Bentonville, Arkansas as an example).
Being in the middle of this high desert boom, I can say that most, if not all of the economic development brought into these areas are high on tech
and low on jobs. Our area, Goldendale Wa., just up the river from the new google server farm, has bent over for a regional landfill,
a gas fired turbine juice plant and windmills (1000's), The jobs created were security and maintenance.
One shining success, The cattle ranchers that had crappy land got rich leasing to the windmill operators.
One stated, " I can afford to ranch again"
Goldendale has an industrial park, It's occupied by the vacant France snowboard factory and a mint oil blending facility.
That is it, nothing else in over 10 years. Since the aluminum smelter shutdown, It's slowly turning into a ghost town.
sotp looking for a job! start a business. think of all of the employees available to you.
Back in the 70's, I lived in Bend, Oregon. I played in a country band (there wasn't hardly any other kind there), and we had a (very) funky gig in Prineville, highlighted by a scene I remember vividly still. An extremely large individual, dressed in flannel and overalls and looking and smelling thoroughly unwashed, came up to the stage and said, "Y'all know Home on the Range?" We tried to explain politely that it wasn't in our set list. After a little back and forth on the subject, he said, "Y'all play Home on the Range or I'm gonna come up there and mix it up a little." After a brief on-stage discussion we decided that the key of C was our best bet, and proceeded. That's gonna be some serious culture shock to a tiny rural bump on the map like that.
That's not an issue in Bentonville, since it's about three hours from Kansas City and about half that to Tulsa -- not to mention nearby Fayetteville, which is about fifteen minutes. Granted, there's not much that's not related to Wal-Mart in Bentonville, but it's not that hard to go outside it.
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
Yes bringing 100 people into an existing population of 10,000 will create at least 500 er 50 er 5 er a couple of jobs er shifts.
Just wait until they start paying in Zanga cash...
why don't they build these things under old age peoples' homes in cold towns?
Le'me guess: aged people don't know how to route the IP packets and have no experience in tending the FarmVille?
A town of 10,000 people is not tiny.
AH Bend. What a mess they made out of that town. Good skiing , but population growth got a bit ahead of the city and county.
The town of 10,000 that was so neat is long gone. Californication at it's best.
A Eugene resident (native)
You mean like Beaverton? (Intel)
Lots of towns in Oregon like that (a dying breed).
Most were dependent on a sawmill (sometimes a very large sawmill). Timber goes, town goes.
Sometimes there is a small town left, and sometimes they remove everything (Valsetz for instance).
Some were even company towns (the lumber company owned everything) Gilchrist OR. for instance.
Even Bend was a mill town, but it had a little more going for it (skiing, county seat) and didn't die out.
Wherever a rural area houses the big pipes running through it, a Data Center will likely pop up. Especially when Hydroelectric power, Wind and Solar are prevalent.
the same thing every business does. Do you think that I sell to my neighbours? I'm in a city of over 7 million persons, and I sell to suburbs and surrounding cities more than I do to any of the 7 million.
You seem to think that there's just nothing that you can do on your own. That you need someone else to take the risks. More importantly, you seem to think that those risks don't translate right down the line to every employee. Only difference is that the employee doesn't have any control over that risk -- but they are still governed by it.
Yes, I think your other local businesses would prefer to have local suppliers within strangling range than not. Yes I think you can compete with others. Plain and simple. Yes I think there are services and products that you can offer to your community. Yes I think there are many of them.
Damn it, so many. You could start with an import business. It's not easy to import goods from foreign countries. If you're in a small town, odds are that you purchase such things from other companies who themselves do the importing, and, obviously, charge for their services. All those companies do is pay taxes and arrange transportation, and the occasional safety regulations. It's work, but it's no mystery. You can do it for ten cents less. The only reason for your neighbours not to use you is because they hate you. Otherwise, as long as you get the stuff to them, and you charge them less, they've nothing to lose.
But you don't need me to tell you what your community may or may not need. I'd presume that you can look at 10'000 persons and determine what would benefit them, or how you could improve their situation.
If you can't, then you deserve to have someone else telly ou what to do, every day of your life. And if you can't find someone who wants to boss you around, then you must not be worth the effort.
That's what is done in Helsinki. Actually data processing can be very economical and green. If the waste heat generated from process will be used for something useful.
As it's being done here: http://www.greendiary.com/entry/helsinki-data-centre-installed-in-cathedral-bomb-shelter-to-heat-500-homes/
It's just logical to use waste heat from any other sources (like industry processes) is being re-used in similar way.
The people from Detroit would come and steal all the copper leading into the place...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yes, it is a job making law. No question.
As for no value added, do you live in Oregon? It rains A LOT. And when it's like 45 and soupy rain, getting colder, it's absolutely great to pull up, stuff a 20 out the window, and get your gas pumped, easy cheezy.
I know my regular gas guy. We have a running conversation over the years, kids, family, politics, you name it. There is a lot of value there too.
As for prices? It's a few pennies most of the time, and sometimes it's less here than it is in Washington.
There, it's all pre-pay, barren stations, often dirty, crime laden, with some dude in what I can only characterize as the smallest possible workspace, barking at you through some shitty PA.
Of course, one can go to the nicer stations, where they figure out new and interesting ways to get you inside to buy stuff...
So the value is debatable, clearly. No question. But, let's be clear. It's not a significant price difference. I've lived here a long time, and the cost of gas relative to the "do it yourself" states has never been significant enough to warrant giving up the option of just staying in the car on a shitty day.
Blogging because I can...
These types of places make a lot of sense. Google also has a datacenter in The Dalles, Oregon. This is because of great access to electricity, bandwidth and local labor. Not to mention these towns often welcome these companies with open arms by giving them tax breaks and allowing them to build with minimal interference. Not to mention cheap land prices. If they tried to build this same facility in Hillsboro, Oregon (where the majority of Intel campuses are located as well as other tech companies) they would be paying a much higher price for land, fighting for electricity and bandwidth, and battling the local government every step of the way. This move should surprise nobody.
You got that right.
(Native Oregonian who has lived in Bend before it got crazy.)
The total population in Crook County is under 20,000. The adjacent Deschutes County is around 115,000. Prineville is kind of off the beaten path for transportation and I certainly wouldn't think about starting an import business there.
Until Les Schwab died Prineville was the headquarters of Les Schwab tires. They still have a distribution warehouse there. That's the big employer in Prineville.
one of the challenges that every business industry goes through is figuring out how to serve a market that the established competitors can't seem to serve. One of Amazon's big problems was, and still is, where to place warehouses to ease shipping to anywhere. In my area of Canada, they actually use warehouses and shipping owned by other businesses -- as in a local cooking store can offer to store and ship amazon orders on their behalf. (I'm making up the cooking store part for this conversation).
one of the big challenges for large import companies is figuring out how to serve the so many small markets that aren't in large cities. If you were to take the time to build a model that would allow you to serve small communities, you'd be able to grow your business in a way that only a new and agile company can -- in a way that existing large import companies can't.
I'm not really disagreeing with you but Prineville really is kind of off the beaten path. The closest town of any size to the east of it is John Day, Oregon with a population of around 1,800. It's 116 miles away over a winding mountain road that can be tough in the winter. There's not much but mountains and desert to the north and south of it. There's not that much distribution opportunity from Prineville that isn't better from Bend, Redmond or Madras along US 97 to the west. Of course distributing electronic bits doesn't suffer from the transportation issues that physical goods do so Facebook can take advantage of the cheap land and electricity.
As someone living in the area, I can report that you're pretty much on the ball. The Prineville FB data center employs 35 people, but the tech jobs were all filled out of area. The lower grade jobs were filled locally. The days of tech staff on site seem to be gone. When I was operations manager at one of the largest DC's in Europe, most had a large staff of Networking, Unix, Windows, database and operations experts on site 24x7x365. Nowadays, most of the work is done remotely. The impact on local employment tends to come more from the building and ongoing maintenance of the facilities, rather than the hiring of locals as techs. Prineville (and the whole central Oregon area) really doesn't have any sort of tech base anyway.
First any engineer they try to hire may just balk at having to live in such a small town. There are far bigger metro areas with good rates for electricity in the intermountain west that can provide 80% air cooling a year. Colorado Springs comes to mind where Walmart is considering building a Datacenter, and Verizon Wireless, Fedex, HP, and a few others already have facilities there as well, the cost of living is much cheaper compared to silicon valley or New York. I sure hope for their sake this small town is not far from Portland. Takes a special person to want to work in a town that small.
FWIW, data centers employ less than 100 people in most cases once it's built out, with small increases per 10000 sqft think 1-2 more people to cover the added workload. Considering the company involved, they will probably have a skeleton crew of facilities folks and a few engineers to handle the "Hands On" work. The rest will be taken care of remotely.
And in most cases these people just got sold out to facebook in the form of massive Tax breaks for facebook, that will not reduce the tax burden of the people who lived there. I think Colorado Springs is throwing millions in tax incentives to Walmart just to attract the business, not sure how a town of 10,000 could afford such large tax breaks, so hopefully it works out for them.
Oh yes, there were lots of tax breaks given and those were a source of a lot of local angst. They have a 15 year exemption from property taxes and were looking for a 10 year exemption from state income and excise taxes.
I have a business here. I need to employ a couple of decent network and server techs. Nothing fancy. Just need to know some basic networking stuff and how to maintain a mail server, read logs, do basic troubleshooting, etc. After a month of looking, forget about it. The few people in the area with those skills are snapped up. The reason you can't pump your own gas here is pretty obvious; most of the population here can't do anything more complicated. I have friends who operated stores that they had to close down because they couldn't get trustworthy staff.
Had to throw in Kinzua, another dead, bulldozed company town, I grew up their hunting deer with my family right up from the golf course, Yes A Golf Course. Watch out for the cow pies. Had a log cabin bar and a general store right out of a "fill in the blank" book. It's a shame it's gone.
well a lights out DC which is what these are don't have that many employees - I did the sums and reckoned a Google one could probably have only 20 or so Full time employees plus some local minimum wage security guards.
Serverfarmville.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Replace the car industry with the IT industry with these data centers and we are talking awesomeness!
It is amazing for these people to now be able to draw some more economic help from the big companies!
I am intrigued by this book of faces. Is it some new fangled phone directory?
Actually, it's a book full of worthless "faeces" ("feces" if you're a Yank), not "faces". The people who founded it knew it would end up full of shit, but just couldn't spell.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
So, we get this story about servers being cooled by "fresh air" at the same time the same data center is being derided for pulling most of its energy from coal-fired plants. (http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/youre-so-coal-trying-to-shame-facebook/)
I'm not saying Facebook is evil here, but this story looks like a PR plant do downplay the environmental concerns here.
I just spent four solid days driving around Vermont. I was appaled (or would have been, had I known how to spell it) at the lack of quality of the FM radio coverage. Within ten miles, a radio station would be good, be garbled, and be good again.
Obviously, there's a mountain in the way. But that's like calling interference in a school-yard football game when the ball hits a tree. The tree was there first. You knew the tree was there.
I'd have thought that by now, Stowe Vermont being older than FM radio, that there'd have been a network of repeaters to dodge the mountain.
I made up an import business as the first thing that came to mind for a small town. But between the people, the land, the weather, and the wildlife, you can't tell me that there's nothing that can survive in a given town. And even to that, I'll say that your business can be local to the next town, and you can still live in your town. Either way, unemployment is almost always the fault of the unemployed.
see, now that's what I wanted to hear. And more to your point, your comment was moderated down. The solution to the entire problem was moderated down. So I believe you when you say that they worth hiring.
You are wrong. They will, and they do.
Datacenter work is the "blue collar" end of the IT spectrum. With the right toolset in place, anyone can be trained to do it.
"The Prineville FB data center employs 35 people, but the tech jobs were all filled out of area"
Wrong, and wrong again. Just because you live nearby doesn't mean you have a clue what is going on inside. More than half the full-time tech jobs have been filled locally.
Additionally the site has been under construction for over a year and a half employing hundreds of people, both locally and from all over the Pacific Northwest. All those folks have been spending their money in Crook County, hotels, restaurants, bars, etc. Every day for the past 18 months. I've seen Central Oregon before this project began, and since - the economic benefits have been palpable and positive.
Disclosure: I work for the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, which recently received donations from Facebook.
I've been out to this datacenter. They employed quite a number of locals to build the place, and although the skeleton crew is only 35, they plan to keep a bigger crew of hundreds out there most of the time. In the medium term, they plan to build *two* more buildings the size of their current one, extending their current need for construction for another two years or so, and requiring a reasonably-sized group of engineers to live in the Prineville area for a while. So Facebook's put money, jobs, and consumers into Prineville, and apparently, according to the locals, this was a real lifesaver for many of the construction workers who were otherwise broke and unemployed.
I'm not a fan of Facebook, but this doesn't really seem like a horrible corporate exploitation.
~ C.
We're talking about data centers. So it's not even about giving/creating jobs at all. It's about reducing jobs.
That's the whole idea of automation - cut costs. The computers do most of the work, and you only need a very few to do what the computers can't.
There will be some initial jobs when setting stuff up, even then if there's no airconditioning there won't be "installing and maintaining air conditioning" related jobs either.
The workers making the servers are in places like China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Brazil etc. And if robots ever become cheaper than those workers, those workers will start losing jobs too.
So putting data centers there will create hundreds of no-experience-required jobs for local people? Or will the DCs simply be large buildings with a skeleton staff which neither employ locals nor create much additional local demand for human-attended resources?
Perhaps they're talking about additional employment during construction, rather than long-term?
Google's smart.
Middle of nowhere, but close to Bend, OR which underwent a real estate boom and bust. So I'm imagining real estate is dirt cheap. Lot's of outdoor sports, breweries, and boutique shops in Bend, so Googlers or Googlites or Googlies will have a place to romp. Not to mention the weed is fantastic from Eugene...
As well, this the east side of the Cascades, so there are many microclimates ranging from high desert to rain forest to lush valleys. Night time is always frigid. Lots of wind power access.
Smart.
Browse at 1. You'll thank me later.
You're right of course, when comparing it to, say, a proper tech company campus. Though at "Facebook scale", their centers might have quite a bit of HVAC and electrical work... beyond the build-outs. At least a lot for a town of only 10,000.
Plus with other places coming in too, it'll be something of a tax revenue generator. Play their cards right with those dollars and they might be able to turn it into a place worth living. Then the sky is the limit. I seem to remember a similar story about some depressed former mining town or something in the midwest that ended up reinventing itself as a mini tech mecca.