Issue 10, June/July
FOCUS FACEBOOK
SETTLES INTO A SMALL RURAL TOWN Facebook’s first wholly owned data center is taking shape, FOCUS’ Yevgeniy Sverdlik was given an exclusive invite
Oregon that hardly anyone outside of central Oregon itself had heard of. The town was first put on the map for the data center industry by Facebook’s initial announcement of the project in January.
O
The following month, the general public learned about Prineville after Greenpeace’s public criticism of the company’s choice of power supplier generated controversy in the news.
So why Prineville? Why did the company that has become one of the most powerful symbols of our high-tech era choose a small rural town, surrounded by miles upon miles of ranch land and golf courses, to locate the facility that will soon house some of its core infrastructure?
The area was attractive for Facebook because of relatively cheap power, availability of water and dark fiber, cool climate and a “shovel-ready” site, more than 120 acres in size, said Ken Patchett, the man Facebook hired away from Google to oversee construction and future day- to-day operation of the data center.
The site’s shovel-ready characteristic was a big deal. It was part of an economic development program the state had created to attract big business. The program identifies certain large pieces of undeveloped land and pre-approves them for certain uses, including large industrial facilities. This enables companies that buy the sites to avoid lengthy and expensive environmental-review and other permitting processes developers usually have to undergo.
Average cost of power for industrial customers in the area is about $0.5 per kWh, said Jason Carr, an economic development manager for a non-profit organization called Economic Development for Central Oregon. The large local power supplier that will be selling power to Facebook is Pacific Power, a subsidiary of PacifiCorp, which also serves areas of Oregon and California.
f all the places Facebook could build its first company-owned data center, it chose Prineville – a town of about 10,000 in central
TITAN OF THE INFORMATION AGE
The words “Welcome Facebook” can be read on billboards and in storefronts around Prineville
Another benefit for Facebook is Oregon’s relatively friendly taxation code. There is no sales tax in the state, so the only recurring tax burdens are property and income taxes. Since the future data center will only have about 35 employees, income tax will not be much of a concern. “It’s mainly your property taxes on the land and taxes you pay for the building and equipment,” Carr said. The company will be able to avoid much of the remaining tax burden for a while as result of incentives it received from the state. Its construction and equipment costs (including IT gear) will be tax free for 15 years.
company that has become one of the most powerful symbols of our high-tech era choose a small rural town...”
“So why Prineville? Why did the
The project’s mastermind was Tom Furlong, the company’s director of site operations. Facebook decided to build its own data center to have a solution tailored to its purposes, Patchett said. At the scale the company has reached, it is important to have infrastructure that is built in a way that supports its particular
business model. “In other colo spaces, they have to be 33 flavors of vanilla for everybody.”
Facebook is going to keep its sizeable footprint in multiple colocation sites in California and Virginia and there are no plans at this point to halt capacity expansion at those sites. “We’re doing a lot of work in (California) to get as much data there as we can,” Patchett said. “Here (in Prineville) is another site and there’s the other site (in Virginia), so the redundancy that’s available … when this one comes online, will actually really help us an awful lot.”
THE DESIGN
The company has ambitious ‘green’ goals for the facility. “The goal is to be the most efficient steward of the electrons that we consume,” Patchett said. “How can we do that and how many things can we do to actually move to a lower PUE?” Declining to specify the actual target ratio, he said it was expected to be well below the industry-average PUE of 1.8. The team is going for at least a LEED Gold certification.
The facility, brainchild of Facebook’s Data Center Design Architect Jay Park, will be built out in two phases, with about 40,000 square feet of computer floor in each phase.
www.datacenterdynamics.com 41
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