Apple May Build Oregon Data Center Next To Facebook's

1sockchuck writes "Apple may build a huge new data center next door to the Facebook server farm in rural Prineville, Oregon. Slashdot has previously noted the potential that Prineville could become a data center mecca due to its climate, which is ideal for using fresh air to cool servers. The scenario could mirror the trend in rural North Carolina, where both Apple and Facebook have built data centers. It's always been likely that Apple will need at least one other large data center complex to provide backup capabilities for the facility in North Carolina."

Comments

Opportunity

[Reyendo]

One well placed nuclear missile...

Re:Opportunity

[Pseudonym Authority]

Fired from orbit, just to be sure.

Re:Opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just a normal explosive, you freak.

Re:Opportunity

[Luckyo]

Blowin up near the orbit is more then enough. EMP will fry those servers.

Re:Opportunity

[tenco]

Freak?! It's the only way to be sure!

Re:Opportunity

[dave562]

If you were going to fire the missile, why not hit SuperNAP in Vegas? There are a whole slew of government contractors there. That would be the better target for anyone crazy enough to use a nuke.

better a little more north

[statsone]

Canada offers cheap electricity and even cooler temperatures. More than welcome here.

Re:better a little more north

[mcrbids]

Sadly, your country doesn't have the strong privacy laws like we have in the United States *cough* Patriot Act *cough* so this is not a possibility.

Re:better a little more north

[rtb61]

Build for summer, regret the winters. Cool summer temperatures inevitably mean snow in winter and travel is difficult in snow. Cheap cooling, park yourself near the coast in temperate climes and use heat exchangers to achieve your cooler temperatures. Also avoid, typhoon or hurricane prone zones, tornadoes, seismic instability and of course flooding. Power should also be drawn from more than one grid, close access to a university is also desirable (user testing, direct training), a substantive employment base to avoid having to bring in all staff and, access to main thorough fairs for better transport options is also desirable.

Likely what went on with that choice was some stupidly corrupt pay no taxes deal, something that should be put a stop to a federal, state and county level. What ever happened to all being treated equally, screw the scum sucking corporate tax cheats.

Re:better a little more north

[AHuxley]

They want to be "near" the $1.5 billion NSA centre Utah Data Center ~Camp Williams.

Re:better a little more north

[TubeSteak]

Cheap cooling, park yourself near the coast in temperate climes and use heat exchangers to achieve your cooler temperatures.

There are strict EPA regulations on how much heat you can dump into a body of water.
It's infinitely faster and easier to just park your data center somewhere cold and then deal with the snow.

Re:better a little more north

[evilviper]

You missed one... Airport. All good datacenters are located rather close to a major commercial passenger airport, for easy access.

Re:better a little more north

[benjamindees]

I kind of figured that was because they were mostly built by military contractors and airports had better air defenses in case of attack.

Re:better a little more north

[evilviper]

Yes, I'm very, very well versed in remote-access and out-of-band management, but it doesn't preclude the need for going on-site for major overhaul, or build-outs, which fast-growing shops will find frequent need of.

Besides, the fact that someone only occasionally needs to go there doesn't negate the benefits of quick and easy access, particularly if you're giving tours to management.

Re:better a little more north

[Anonymous Coward]

Travel is fine is snow. Most of Canada commutes through real winter every year; we're used to it. It's only places that don't get regular snow that are shut down by blizzards.

As another poster points out, we do (still) have privacy laws. That's what makes us no-go for this sort of data-center.

(Incidentally "cool summer temperatures inevitably mean snow in winter" isn't exactly right either. We get stinking hot summers in most of our major cities that get serious snow. Wet-coast Vancouver is much more moderate in both seasons.)

Re:better a little more north

[QuantumRiff]

Actually, none of the big Oregon Datacenters are near major airports..

Prineville is near Bend, OR, near the center of the state. Bend doesn't have a large airport, and just a few flights a day. Google has their datacenter in TheDalles, OR, about 1.5 hours east of Portland along the Columbia River, and Amazon's is another few hours past Google's, near Hermiston/Umitilla

Re:better a little more north

[chromas]

Studded packets. Is that how torrents reproduce?

Re:better a little more north

[turkeyfeathers]

You missed one... Airport. All good datacenters are located rather close to a major commercial passenger airport, for easy access.

Really not necessary anymore... just turn on Remote Desktop and you can access your computers remotely.

Re:better a little more north

[travisco_nabisco]

It is almost like these data centers are designed to server data to remote computers.

Re:better a little more north

[cluedweasel]

So how does Prineville fit in then? The nearest passenger airport is Redmond, about 20 miles away but it's hardly a major airport. The nearest large airport would be PDX, but that's a good 3.5 hours away across the Cascade mountains. Not an easy trip in the winter.

Re:better a little more north

[cluedweasel]

Summers in Prineville (and central Oregon in general) aren't exactly cool. 90F to 100F temps aren't uncommon. The upside is that they are pretty short. This year we barely got out of winter in July!

Re:better a little more north

[riverat1]

I know the Prineville area well. It is very dry there. It's cold in the winter but a big snowfall is pretty rare. More than 6 inches of snow on the ground is rare. It can get into the 90's and occasionally the 100's (Fahrenheit) in the summer but the overnight lows are still in the 50's and 60's generally. The only time it gets humid is when there are thunderstorms, maybe 5 days a year. No hurricanes or tornadoes and where the data centers are located flooding is not an issue. It's not a seismic zone and probably the worse natural disaster would be one of the volcanoes in the area going off but that's so rare it's not worth worrying about.

I believe Crook County did give them some sort of tax deal but it's not zero property taxes and they'll come out ahead in the long run. The biggest problem probably is finding people to work there. It's a long way from anywhere. Bend and Redmond (Oregon) are 30-40 miles away and it's a 4 hour drive to Portland. The night life in Prineville (what there is of it) consists mainly of redneck bars but Bend has some good things going on. If you're the city type you wouldn't like it much but if the the outdoorsy type it's a great area to live. The cost of living is fairly low there. The road access is good and US 97 which goes through Bend and Redmond is the major highway just east of the Cascade Mountains.

Re:better a little more north

[riverat1]

The airport at Redmond (less than 30 miles away) is capable of handling all but the largest modern aircraft (anything smaller than a 747 or A380.) It has scheduled service with daily flights to Portland, Seattle, San Fransisco, Salt Lake City and Denver.

Re:better a little more north

[evilviper]

Right, because servers will just rack themselves...
Network cabling can just rearrange itself as needed...
And you never, ever have a major issue or outage requiring someone to get on-site in a hurry...

Re:better a little more north

[nomel]

Maybe intermittently using a fleet of taxis are cheaper than industrial sized air conditioners running 24/7. ;-)

Re:better a little more north

[evilviper]

SLA penalties for an extra couple hours, and high-end employee's hourly rates are probably higher than the property price savings, no matter how cheap the taxi service...

Now a bullet-train...

Re:better a little more north

[cthulhu11]

It's also strongly protectionist of domestic business and hostile to business from below the border. The government wouldn't be inclined to let Apple build a big DC there.

Re:better a little more north

[LordLimecat]

If its really super urgent, they have remote hands, and hopefully you have KVM-over-IP. One would also assume that if "power outage exceeding CoLo's generator capacity" is an issue, that you would have a fail-over location.

Re:better a little more north

[pgpalmer]

Infinitely?

Re:better a little more north

[mattack2]

Likely what went on with that choice was some stupidly corrupt pay no taxes deal, something that should be put a stop to a federal, state and county level. What ever happened to all being treated equally, screw the scum sucking corporate tax cheats.

(I'm talking in general about these kinds of deals.)

How is it cheating, if the government that would be collecting the taxes is the one that signed the deal in the first place?

I don't necessarily disagree that these kinds of things should stop, but at least many of them (e.g. new stadiums) get public votes, and people vote for them.

Re:better a little more north

[swalve]

And it doesn't cost all that much to build a runway or a helipad.

Re:better a little more north

[riverat1]

The Prineville airport is just across the highway from the data centers but it's not set up for heavy aircraft. The runways are paved but only 5,000 feet by 60 feet and 4,000 feet by 40 feet. The 2 runways at Redmond are 7,000 feet by 150 feet and by 100 feet. Building a large runway isn't cheap. To handle the load of landing aircraft the pavement is often more than two feet thick, up to 4 feet sometimes.

Re:better a little more north

[evilviper]

If its really super urgent, they have remote hands

Yes, remote hands with about the same capabilities as a 9 year-old... They're okay at going into the right cage, finding the correct label, and pushing the blue button, but that's about it... and they still occasionally screw that up.

I wouldn't even try to have them move some fiber optic cables around for me, no matter how urgent.

One would also assume that if "power outage exceeding CoLo's generator capacity" is an issue, that you would have a fail-over location.

Ignore power outage, and consider any other kind of outage.

It's fine to say: There's an unknown outage at out primary datacenter, requiring fail-over to our backup. We'll have a tech on-site in one hour to determine the cause.

Replace an "hour" with a "day" and you have some real explaining to do, to whoever depends on your services.

Re:better a little more north

[Bug-Y2K]

Industrial rates in the Columbia Basin (read Oregon & Washington states) are LESS than 2 per kW/hr. This is why the pacific northwest is the prime location for datacenters in the USA.

The Job Creators at Work

[Anonymous Coward]

With another 50 Jobs the unemployment problem should be licked!

Re:The Job Creators at Work

[93 Escort Wagon]

With another 50 Jobs the unemployment problem should be licked!

Do large data centers employ even that many people? (serious question)

Re:The Job Creators at Work

[AHuxley]

Guards, a few low end staff to swap out the data media when needed 24/7, gardeners so the landscape looks pretty for a congress critter media event, a few smart admins to cover all the real time error reports (off site is fine).
No need for on site engineers, plumbers, electricians, technical staff, admins - just swap out the media and look at id's at the gates.

Re:The Job Creators at Work

[QuantumRiff]

Facebook has about 55 employees onsite in prineville (a town of 10k). They are adding more when they finish their second datacenter at the location. I was reading an article yesterday about how the town loves it.. Facebook orders lunch from a different local restraunt every day for 55 employees. Use locals for as much as they can, and only a few of the employees are transplants, most were trained locally.

Plus more than half of the construction jobs were sourced locally..

Now the amazon datacenter, up in boardman, OR, that is just basically a bunch of shipping containers..

Re:The Job Creators at Work

[cluedweasel]

Got a link? As far as I can tell, FB recruited about 5 people from C.O. and imported the rest. There is a large amount of local resentment regarding the tax breaks given to FB. I also saw the number of employees listed as 30, not 55.

Re:The Job Creators at Work

[Bug-Y2K]

As far as I can tell you are dead wrong. Very few imports, almost all local hires.

Apple and Facebook new theory about data

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Osmosis!

Re:Apple and Facebook new theory about data

[pckl300]

No, from one cloud to another, it's called lightning.

Ok who else...

[Anonymous Coward]

Looked at zillow upon reading this to see if prineville was worth moving to.

Not bad pricing actually, but lacks some good homes larger than starter. I'm curious if a data center has a need for a good programmer or if they would be hiring grunts while all the tech work is done else where

Re:Ok who else...

[rsmith-mac]

They would just be hiring grunts. The NC Apple data center only has about 50 employees, as the only on-site people they need are techies to keep the servers up. Data centers themselves are capital-intensive but require little in the way of permanent labor beyond the skeleton crew, as the only big labor pushes would be construction and whatever you bring in if you overhaul the systems.

Re:Ok who else...

[cluedweasel]

It's the redneck centre of Oregon. Massively depressed, a pretty much unskilled workforce, a huge meth and alcohol problem and those who aren't unemployed are pretty much on minimum wage. It's seen the biggest drop in property prices outside of Vegas and the local government is pretty much bust. As for Mount Bachelor, it's more expensive to ski there than pretty much anywhere else in the US. The lifts are frequently out of service but don't expect a refund.

Re:Ok who else...

[cthulhu11]

Systems from everyone but Soracle (who have worked hard to keep away customers) require some grunt on-site to plug in a monitor and keyboard for initial setup, too. In a large DC that can mean multiple FTE's. Now that I'm forced to move away from Sun-class hardware, I'm dumbfounded by the abject lack of real lights-out capabilities from HP, IBM, and Dell.

Re:Ok who else...

[swalve]

I can't speak for IBM and Dell, but HP servers all have iLo, which is as close as you can get without having a robot butler standing there. Plus, I would imagine that an operation like this has the racks built-up and set-up elsewhere and just uncrates them and plugs them in at the site. Shouldn't ever have to plug a keyboard in.

Error 503 Service Unavailable

[larry bagina]

Maybe slashdot needs an Oregon data center.

smart move on Apple's behalf

[bluelip]

They realize that FB will be going the route of MySpace after Google+ takes hold. Since they're in the same town, easy move for Apple to procure those resources.

Facebook should patent Oregon datacenters

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook should sue apple for stealing their datacenter location ideas :)

Re:Facebook should patent Oregon datacenters

[Mitsoid]

Wrong, Sir. Facebook is obviously infringing on apple's intellectual property by building a data center that has 4 walls, a floor, and a ceiling.

Re:Facebook should patent Oregon datacenters

[failedlogic]

Thankfully for Facebook, their building does not not have rounded corners.....

Idealer Climate

[Anonymous Coward]

Ideal climate? I'd say Luleå (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lule%C3%A5#Climate) is closer to ideal, where Facebook is building its European server halls. (also has a technical university next door among other things).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2054168/Facebook-unveils-massive-data-center-Lulea-Sweden.html

Its like mcDonalds

[QuantumRiff]

When I was a kid, I remember my store manager (one of the franchise owners) mentioning how much research went into a new location for McDonalds. The sheer amount of research, planning, etc. And he (probably jokingly) said that Burger King would just look for where McDonalds was building, and go across the street :)

Re:Its like mcDonalds

[mcsqueak]

When I was a kid, I remember my store manager (one of the franchise owners) mentioning how much research went into a new location for McDonalds. The sheer amount of research, planning, etc. And he (probably jokingly) said that Burger King would just look for where McDonalds was building, and go across the street :)

He may have been "half joking", but that is indeed done, and it's why you often see clusters of fast food (or coffee shops, or whatever) businesses together. The basic idea is that one company did a bunch of research and determined the site was good. The next company comes along, and says "Hey, Brand A is here, so we should probably be here as well". They'll preform their own market research and due diligence regarding the site of course, but the existence of other brands there drives up the idea that the site is good location.

Furthermore, these business clusters serve to actually drive up business far all the brands located there, despite them being competitors and for the most past interchangeable with each other, as you gain a larger share of customer traffic to an area with many businesses.

Lastly, my current company is majority owned by one of the early investors and owners of Hollywood video. He said that Hollywood and Blockbuster would engage in the same practice of locating physically close to a competitor's store, because that area would have good customer demographics.

Its a pretty interesting topic, really..

Re:Its like mcDonalds

[swalve]

Yes. McDonald's was one of the first commerical users of satellite imagery. Bunch of houses being built? Build a store. It has been said that they are in the real estate business, and selling hamburgers just gives them built-in tenants. (Most of the time, McCorp owns the property the restaurant sits on. If it is a franchise, the franchisee owns the building and pays rent.)

What to to do with the heat?

[McDrewbie]

And maybe use that heat to warm to poor and cold???? - dr:u

Re:What to to do with the heat?

[McDrewbie]

i meant to warm the poor and cold.

Re:XServe

[TheRaven64]

That was why they made them in the first place - using Dell's in Apple's datacentres was bad for PR. Now it's not so relevant.

Conspiracy

[Faulkner39]

I've been told by a reliable source that at their new data center, Apple is building a large slingshot aimed at FaceBook and has been accumulating large quantities of caged birds.

Re:flooding

[cluedweasel]

The only thing to watch out for in Prineville is if any of the Sisters volcanoes erupt. There is a lava dome building there so you never know........................