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Facebook Revealed As Behind $1.5B "Catapult" Data Center In Iowa

Posted by timothy on from the not-the-drug-flinging-kind dept.

Earlier this month, an article raised the question of who owns the giant data center being built in Altoona, Iowa. Today, the Des Moines Register has an answer, gleaned from "legislative sources." The giant facility, estimated to cost $1.5 billion when construction is complete, is to house a data center for Facebook. The article lists various attributes the site has to make it attractive for all that data, including access to transportation, extensive network infrastructure, and relatively low risk from natural disasters.

37 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. And here I thought... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It was another CIA spy database being set up.

    Oh wait..

    1. Re:And here I thought... by s.petry · · Score: 1

      It is, just indirectly. Facebook does not care which Government agency buys data, who even who's Government for that matter. I'm sure to keep the money rolling in, they try not to step on any toes (without permission that is)

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

  2. Re:And the data center will... by postmortem · · Score: 1

    Unless you block them (ahem, hosts file), they do have data on you... it is enough to browse any web page that has deal with Facebook so that they have data on you.

  3. Re:And the data center will... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Hah! Not only am I blocking at the browser AND network levels, I have the ultimate defence: I have no friends!

  4. Re:Gone with the winds. by Dutchmaan · · Score: 1

    Strong storms and occasional river floodings, apart from that, it's pretty serene. Also Iowa has a pretty strong base in wind power for the green angle.

  5. Don't they know... by Trip6 · · Score: 2

    they are about to be smushed by Google+ ???

    --
    I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
    1. Re:Don't they know... by VeryBest52 · · Score: 1

      Don't they know that linux is going to take over the world? Oh god this is totally flamebait, but i can't resist...

      --
      TheVeryBest
  6. Re:Put it to good use by chromas · · Score: 1

    Well, it's Facebook, so the content will mostly comprise re-re-reposts of faux greeting cards and image macros, plus bathroom mirror shots with ridiculous facial expressions.

  7. Why is ONE building costing $ 1.5 Billion ? by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 1

    The cost of building Trump World Tower is $ 300 Million

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_World_Tower

    It has 967,000 square feet of floor space

    On the other hand, this building in Iowa which cost 5 times more, will have 308,000 square feet of floor space

    What gives ??

    Even if we factored in inflation since 2001, a building in Iowa should not have to cost 5 times a building in New York City

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:Why is ONE building costing $ 1.5 Billion ? by rgbrenner · · Score: 2

      you fail at reading comprehension. 1) the facility is being EXPANDED by 300000sqft to total 1.4m sqft. 2) a data center is obviously more complex and has more power and cooling requirements than an office tower.. and 3) the article mentions apple's 500k sq ft datacenter that cost 1billion... so this facility is not more expensive than other data centers.

    2. Re:Why is ONE building costing $ 1.5 Billion ? by mederbil · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not to mention a data centre requires much more complex engineering for the systems installed inside of it. It has to be able to get a huge amount of electricity and handle that load, it must be properly and efficiently air conditioned. As well it's probably fitted with all kind of precautionary systems such as argon gas fire extinguishing so as to prevent data loss due to fire.

    3. Re:Why is ONE building costing $ 1.5 Billion ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      "...where leaders have provided a green light for a 1.4 million square foot facility. When completely built out, experts expect the facility will cost $1.5 billion."

      Data centers have more strict code requirements than residential space, and need a much much more extensive cooling system, power system, power backup system, fire protection systems, etc. I'd imagine there is redundancy in just about every part of a data center as well. Building a data center is more equivalent to building a factory or chip fab than it is to residential space.

    4. Re:Why is ONE building costing $ 1.5 Billion ? by skine · · Score: 1

      The building is growing by 300,000 square feet, to 1.4 million square feet.

      Plus, given that it's a data center, I'm guessing that a lot of the cost is infrastructure.

    5. Re:Why is ONE building costing $ 1.5 Billion ? by Above · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are a few differences in how the figures are compared here. With a commercial building like Trump World Tower, the figure is for semi-finished space. That's the cost to erect the main structure, build the lobby and other common areas, shell each office (4 walls and a dropped ceiling), and sell the space. It does not include the cost to fit out an individual office space. If you bought a floor and wanted it done in Marble, that would be on-top of the $300 million cost, paid by the tenant. It's not cost to the investors in Trump World Tower, so isn't in the $300M figure. If somewhere someone tallied all the construction and build out costs for all the tenants of that building, it would substantially higher.

      In a single user data center, the costs to build include the shell, power and the fitment of the space. To use some official numbers from a builder in the data center marketplace, CBRE suggests "Data center construction costs average $295 per square foot ($150 to $200 per SF shell, $12M to $18M per MW thereafter depending on the required design resiliency) ".

      1.4 million square feet and $300 per, that's a $420M for a shell. I would hope a project of that size could get some economies of scale and come in at least 20% cheaper than that figure, but it really depends on some of the features a tenant might want.

      I suspect you could run shell costs from near half that for a "bare bones" setup, to near double for some of the fancier features possible to add (biometrics on every door type bells and whistles).

      The big question, is how much power (and cooling, they go together). Low power equipment might require 75 watts/square foot (105 MW), giving a power cost (using the low figure of $12M/MW) of 1.26 Billion; and high power equipment at 300W/square foot (420 MW) would be 5 Billion! Facebook has actually been a pioneer in reducing these costs with it's Open Compute project to make for more efficient setups. This should reduce their power cost well below the average, perhaps shaving 20-30% off that figure as well.

      There's one last thing, what about servers? If it's a single tenant data center some folks might include the servers for such a data center. Conservatively 40 servers a rack, 30 square feet per rack, the building could house 1.86 million servers. At $5000/server, that would be another 9.3 billion!

      Facebook claims just over a billion active users, or about 537 users/server, if this was their only data center. I'll let the rest of the crowd here debate if that's a reasonable amount of infrastructure per user, or too low, or too high.

  8. Overhead in Menlo Park CA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Zuckerberg: "I, owe, I-ow-a, I-owe-a."

    Zuckerberg: "Oh, I, owe, I-ow-a, I-owe-a."

    Zuckerberg: "So, I, owe, I-ow-a, I-owe-a."

    Sandberg: "Shut up Mark!!"

  9. Re:Gone with the winds. by timchampion · · Score: 2

    I grew up near Altoona. Google maps says 3 miles from the site of the data center. There is no chance of flooding in Altoona. As the name suggests, its a relatively high spot - and not near any rivers' flood plain. The biggest threat is tornadoes. Not nearly as much as Oklahoma, but we still have them. Look up Parkersburg, IA tornado of 2008 for a near town-wide leveling by an EF5 tornado.

  10. Re:Facebook rules! by VortexCortex · · Score: 1

    I have a feeling Facebook's whole family is going down.

    Tell us more about this feeling. Is it like there's a party in your pants and everyone's invited?

  11. Re:And the data center will... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Hah! Not only am I blocking at the browser AND network levels, I have the ultimate defence: I have no friends!

    You say that, but are you sure your enemies don't have enemies?

  12. Re:What about tax breaks? by game+kid · · Score: 2

    The campaign contributions and Job Creation(tm) that surely came with this thing would make any applicable politician say "LALALA I can't hear your legal quibbles over the rustles of ALL THE HIGH-VALUE RECTANGULAR LEAVES I SWEPT INTO MY CLOSET."

    --
    You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
  13. Truth by EEPROMS · · Score: 1

    If there was any truth in advertising Facebooks new data centre would be shaped like a huge vacuum cleaner.

  14. Don't forget good average latency by mc6809e · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Iowa is a great spot for giving everyone in the US and Canada decent average latency. It's possible that they might be considering making a play for VoIP or real-time MMPGs or some other real-time interactive service.

    1. Re:Don't forget good average latency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Indeed. The spot where they chose is actually within spitting distance of a large datacenter by lightedge. It is also located on I-80 and within 2 miles of I-35. Heck, even Dice, the now owners of Slashdot, is located in Urbandale about 15 miles down the road by a large TDS/Team Datacenter.

      A lot of the connections from East to West and North to South of North America go through Omaha and Des Moines. Just north of the facility, there is a datacenters with gobs of alternative connectivity that they get as an artifact of having both the connections to Des Moines and dedicated connections to Omaha and Chicago.

      Overall, Iowa is really, really connected to the backbone even though the telco laws are FuBar.

  15. Re:Put it to good use by egcagrac0 · · Score: 1

    You've omitted all of the urban legends that get ((((re)re)re)re)reposted without the "FALSE" that snopes usually adds.

    And the advertising. There will be lots of advertising.

  16. Re:Gone with the winds. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Haven't driven past the site myself, but if they're smart, they'll have built like Wells Fargo did, datacenter underground. No tornado is going to destroy something below the wind path of destruction...

  17. Exaggeration for bragging rights by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They're just talking up the price, the price spent on data centers is part of the marketing for the company and part of the demand to get tax backs from state governments for coming....

    MY datacenter is bigger than YOUR data center.

    and

    WE'RE spending $1.5 Billion in your state so we want so tax back!

    In reality small distributed data centers would be far better, and this most likely doesn't cost $1.5 billion.

    1. Re:Exaggeration for bragging rights by menelaus · · Score: 1

      From my understanding, its multiple buildings. They're going to be pretty freaking huge, but still multiple buildings. Iowa already has tax incentives to help attract companies like Google and Microsoft. I'm not surprised that Facebook is building there. 2 separate power grids (with lots of wind energy), no flooding, you can build buildings to withstand some pretty powerful winds [ Take a tour of LightEdge's data center right across the Interstate to see for yourselves ] not to mention all the dark fiber running all across the state.

      I think its good for Iowa, but I think you hit the point where its a bit of bragging rights and inflation of the numbers to get even more tax breaks and special considerations like lower rates on water, etc. But when it comes down to it, its not going to create many long term high paying jobs which is what the politicians will tout. It will make a few average income workers that will quickly burn out when they realize that they are server monkeys just replacing a server when the light flashes red and nothing more.

  18. That's a lot of money by fustakrakich · · Score: 1

    Google's "Trebuchet" Data Center in Finland only cost 230 mil...

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
    1. Re:That's a lot of money by MaxDollarCash · · Score: 1

      Google's "Trebuchet" Data Center in Finland only cost 230 mil...

      Google is not used as much interactively as facebook. You have idiots posting when they fart on facebook every few minutes. Go figure.

  19. 800 million active users per month = 16 per day by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    FB says it has 800 million active accounts log in each month, if it had 1.86 million servers, that's ONLY 16 users PER SERVER PER DAY.

    Like so many Facebook numbers, these numbers just don't add up. No way could they justify having 1 server to serve only 16 users each day. Lets be generous and say they use it 100 times a month, we're still looking at 1600 a day.

    If this was their one and only server farm, then it would be $3 per user (1 billion users, at least half of which are fake accounts), and they have several data centers.

    So this simply doesn't add up, the price is inflated and the quantity of servers is way beyond the quantity needed. It looks like marketing boasting rather than real world claims.

    1. Re:800 million active users per month = 16 per day by progician · · Score: 3, Insightful

      According to this, there's 680 million logins per day.
      I couldn't find an official Facebook word on it, and the latest estimates are from last August, but they say a magnitude lower, 180k. I highly doubt that within 7 months there would be a 10 fold increase in server numbers.

      So going by these numbers, there's 680.000k/180k = 3778 user/server/day. For a web server, this is pretty good number, as I can imagine, serving 3778 users is a sort of continuous thing, unlike many other websites. Notifications are polled pretty frequently, and as you scroll requests are made constantly to the servers.

      I don't like Facebook, and I think this is a waste of energy and space for storing cat videos and sex-quizzes but the numbers in this case do add up.

    2. Re:800 million active users per month = 16 per day by Above · · Score: 1

      Note that my 1.86 million figure made a couple of gigantic assumptions of 40 servers per rack, and 30 square feet per rack. It would be possible (physically) to do 10' or 11' racks, and get upwards of 60 servers in a rack. Blades (of which OpenCompute is sort of one) figures differently. This also assumes 100% servers, massive disk storage would take up space and power and reduce the number of servers.

      Given what Facebook does I'm going to guess somewhere between 25-50% of the floor space is dedicated to storage. Storage is (relative to servers) low watts per square foot, so it takes up a lot of space.

      I think I would describe the numbers as completely plausible, but very inefficient...but then their business model isn't based on efficiency.

  20. Re:Gone with the winds. by JackCreason · · Score: 1

    I'm sure they'd tap into Des Moines water system for this. Since it would make more since and would not impact the local water system.

  21. Re:Gone with the winds. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Statistically.... tornados are not a threat, it will be interesting to see where they put new powerlines. :)

    There is already a big datacenter in Altoona by LightEdge that claims to be able to take an EF5....though...their generators are outside. There is actually a cool facility 30 miles north in Boone that is Uber Connected and in a retrofitted military bunker. www.infobunker.com

    I have machines in both facilities.

  22. Re:And the data center will... by funkboy · · Score: 1

    Unless you block them (ahem, hosts file), they do have data on you...

    NoScript does the trick pretty nicely too...

  23. Servers are more fragile, can't leave the building by raymorris · · Score: 1

    If the power goes out at my house for a few minutes, it doesn't hurt me. There's a 60% chance that I wouldn't even notice, if I'm not home or I'm asleep. Servers crash hard when their power goes out, so you have to have backup power. If my air conditioning goes out at home, again I probably won't notice if it only last a little while. Servers would be destroyed. When the air conditioning completely went out, I can get in the car and go get a replacement part. The car has AC, so I don't even get hot, it's just an inconvenience. In fact, the bigest inconvenience when the AC went out at home was that I needed to turn off my home server.

    Additionally, a datacenter uses something like 100 watts per square foot of power, which is 100 watts of heat that needs to be removed. A home uses about ONE watt per square foot. So the datacenter needs a hundred times as much power and cooling per square foot. Since it needs to be redundant in the datacenter, that's 200-300X times the power and cooling capacity of a similar sized home.

  24. Re:Gone with the winds. by JackCreason · · Score: 1

    You are correct. Altoona is not connected to the DM system. And to what the other comment was about them being on a plateau, water pipes and water towers my friend.

  25. Fiber what? by RedHat+Rocky · · Score: 1

    Fiber along interstate 80? Uh, that happens to be the ICN, installed by the state:
    http://www.icn.iowa.gov/

    Somehow I (Iowa taxpayer) am not happy about that.

    --
    Anything is possible given time and money.