GigaOM » Maiden

Apple appears to have started building its data center fuel cell project

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:59:09 +0000

One of the things I really wanted to see — but didn’t — on my road trip to Apple’s data center in North Carolina was Apple’s planned fuel cell project from Valley startup Bloom Energy. Alas, if I had only taken to the skies. This week Wired commissioned these aerial photos of the site, and it appears that Apple has already started construction on the massive fuel cell farm as well as the solar farm across the street.

Wired‘s photos show a small plot of land tucked behind the data center with what appears to house concrete pads that could fit the fuel cells. It looks like the configuration I’ve seen for Bloom Energy’s fuel cells. The plot of land is next to a substation.

The solar farm across the street already has solar panels installed on it, too. When I tried to peer into the solar farm in June I only saw the poles to house the solar panels. But it looks like a sizable portion of the panels have been installed.

Workers building out the power lines around Apple’s data center

There’s all this speculation — and buzz — about Apple’s data center project in North Carolina because Apple is building an unprecedented amount of its own clean power to provide electricity for the data center. The Bloom Energy fuel cell project is planned to provide 4.8 MW of energy, which is one of the largest fuel cell projects in the world, and Apple’s two solar panel farms will provide 200 MW.

It also came out last month that Apple is building another smaller “tactical” data center next to the current data center. Tactical data centers like these are not uncommon and can enable Apple to do things like separate the servers for the various IT services and treat those servers differently, or run the separate servers on a different power source as well as helping Apple add on more servers in phases. These small tactical data centers are far cheaper and can be built more quickly.

If you want to know more about energy, data centers and clean power, check out my series:

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Apple building another smaller data center in North Carolina

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 21:03:30 +0000

Workers building out the power lines around Apple’s data center

Apple is building another, smaller, data center, next to its massive iCloud data center, in Maiden, North Carolina, according to the Hickory Daily Record. The new planned 21,030 square-foot, 11-room, data center will store clusters of servers; for comparison the current massive data center on the site is 500,000 square feet.

The Hickory Daily Record reporter also notes that the current plans at the Maiden site show both the new mini data center, as well as the “footprint for a larger data center that would run nearly parallel to the existing one and would t-bone the smaller one currently under construction.” Sounds like Apple has substantially more plans for the Maiden site, which could be one reason for some of the conflicting power numbers that Apple has announced and Greenpeace has been insisting on.

Other Internet companies have used this same model, called a tactical design or a tactical data center. Splitting up some of the servers into a smaller facility could enable Apple to do things like separate the servers for the various IT services it delivers and treat those servers differently, run the separate servers on a different power source or add on more servers in phases. These small tactical data centers are far cheaper and can be built more quickly. A 21,030 square-foot data center probably only consumes around 2.5 MW of power.

Apple chose North Carolina for its original massive data center because the state has some of the cheapest and most reliable power available. That power is mostly from coal and nuclear sources. Other Internet giants, Google and Facebook, have also chosen the region for their east coast data centers. Apple is also building huge solar and fuel cell farms at the Maiden site and says the entire site will be use 100 percent clean energy, through various methods.

To read my complete series on the mega data centers in North Carolina check out my four-part series this week:

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The ultimate geek road trip: North Carolina’s mega data center cluster

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 03:00:16 +0000

This article is the first in a four-part series that we’re publishing this week.

One day, one tank of gas, and three data centers – it was a road trip that only a geek would dream up. My destination: a cluster of cutting-edge and massive data centers spread across a few hundred miles north of Charlotte, North Carolina.

If data centers, filled with thousands of servers, are the engines of the Internet, then North Carolina is one of the garages for the Hummers of the tech world: The state is where Apple, Google and Facebook have decided to build their East Coast data centers. It’s a coup for North Carolina to have wooed all three elite Internet brands.

View Road trip: The North Carolina data center corrider in a larger map

But that’s not the only reason the North Carolina data center corridor is important. As companies and consumers move more services and content into the cloud, and more people around the world get access to the Internet, it will spark a building boom for ever-larger data centers. According to a report from GigaOM Pro (subscription required), the number of data centers is growing at a 15 percent rate per year globally, and there are an estimated over 33 million servers in the world (over 500,000 individual data centers by some accounts). More and bigger data centers – and North Carolina’s are some of the world’s biggest — will, in turn, require a greater use of resources, from energy to land to water to human capital.

One thing North Carolina doesn’t have a lot of is clean power. The local utility Duke Energy largely runs off coal and nuclear. So in an unprecedented move, Apple is trying to engineer its own clean energy here. It is building the world’s largest privately-owned solar panel farm, and a huge fuel-cell farm that will run on biogas. North Carolina is thus an experiment of whether tech companies can develop sustainable ways to manage the exploding rates of Internet usage and data consumption.

Poles dot the dusty solar farm, which will eventually hold solar panels.

The state’s data center corridor is also a test of the new IT economy’s power to create jobs. In the old days, if a town landed a GM car plant or a Nucor steel factory, it created thousands, or even tens of thousands, of jobs, spawned an entire economic base, and ensured a middle class. But much of the Internet-fueled tech economy is famously lean. Economists will be watching closely to see whether North Carolina’s data center corridor can help change the employment picture north of Charlotte, which has been hobbled by the decline of manufacturing.

Road trip. . . to see data centers?

The road trip starts off on a rain-soaked, commuter-clogged morning in the SouthPark neighborhood of Charlotte (check out our Google Map of the trip). Forty-five miles later — past BBQ joints, local churches like The Lambs of Christ, and a John Deere outlet — I find myself in Maiden (population: a bit over 3,000). The sleepy, and economically depressed, outpost, just an hour’s drive from the Appalachian Mountains, has a smattering of homes, each with an American flag fluttering in the gentle breeze.

The downtown has just a couple open stores, including Catawba Surplus and Firearms, which buys and sells guns, and Scottie’s Bar-B-Que, which serves me up a plate of black-eyed peas, fried okra and baked beans for under $6. A Jeep pulls in front of me with a sticker on the back window that reads, “Girls Hunt Too!” in pink writing with the outline of a deer head.

Downtown Maiden, North Carolina

This is about as far away as you can get from Silicon Valley, but it’s home to Apple’s data center and massive solar farm. While Apple is known for its leading-edge design, the data center itself looks like a standard server farm: a huge gray bunker-looking building with few windows and a lot of power lines snaking into it. The location is marked only by signs for the construction company, Holder Construction, that is helping Apple build its solar farm across the street from the data center.

The entrance to Apple’s solar farm

Before lunch, I circle the perimeter of the solar farm in my bright-red rental car and pull off the highway to try to catch a peek at the solar panels. Hundreds of poles dot the flat dusty field. Eventually I think these poles will be fitted with solar panels and mechanical trackers that will tilt the panels to follow the sun throughout the day. A sign on the fence I’m peeking through warns trespassers to stay off the land (and also to not “molest quail,” which causes my inner Beavis to start laughing).

Stay out! Of Apple’s solar farm

How to land a data center in your town

The Internet giants chose this rural, economically depressed and socially conservative region as the hub for some of their biggest data centers in large part because they were courted by the state and local counties. Other areas — Prineville, Oregon, Quincy, Washington, and Northern Virginia – have used similar tactics to achieve similar results to recruit data center operators.

Economic development groups and the local utility in North Carolina, starting at least back in 2005 and 2006, began targeting tech companies with the promise of cheap, reliable power and tax breaks, in an effort to replace lost manufacturing jobs. Beyond Apple, Google and Facebook, North Carolina is home to data centers for Disney, Wipro, AT&T, Charlotte’s banking community, the state’s own data center, and other facilities by major companies.

But landing this slate of elite tech companies so far hasn’t really moved the needle on the state’s overall long term employment. Data centers can create hundreds of construction jobs in the building phase, but tend to only create a couple dozen long-term jobs once the facilities are built — and these jobs are often for highly trained engineers rather the typical local resident.

Invisible in plain site

It’s not easy to tour the data centers here. The Internet giants (even the ones that tend to be transparent) aren’t exactly eager to show off their facilities for competitive and security reasons. They don’t tend to let any outsiders — let alone a reporter — inside the vaults. My road trip was largely of the grounds and regions, not of the aisles of servers themselves.

The sign in front of Google’s data center

Thirty miles northwest of Maiden is Lenoir, a much larger town (about six times the population) than Maiden. It’s home to Google’s $600 million data center, which was the first in the area back in 2006 and 2007. From the outside, Google’s data center looks more impenetrable than a maximum security prison — it’s got large mesh-covered fences topped with barbed-wire that block off any view of the facility and also deter trespassers. I take a picture of the Google sign at the front of the complex, and a guard steps out of a booth and starts yelling.

The building around Google’s data center has high mesh-covered fences and barbed wire around it.

Another 60 miles southwest of Lenoir is Facebook’s data center in Forest City, the newest site in the region. You can easily see it from the freeway, and it’s the biggest building around for miles. The entrance is marked only by a Facebook sign. The first of the data center’s two buildings is already up and running and serving traffic on the East Coast. The entire facility will be done by late this year or early next year.

Facebook’s data center

Along the road trip to the North Carolina data center triangle, (and before and after), I interviewed local economic development groups, the local utility Duke Energy, Google and Facebook’s data center executives, and residents in the towns that are home to the data centers. Apple declined to be interviewed for this story.

This week I’ll publish a four-part series of articles looking at different facets of North Carolina’s emerging data center cluster, including the story of how Apple’s iCloud data center got built, and a look inside the controversial world of clean power and data centers.

The physical Internet

Beyond the important economic, technological and environmental issues at stake with data centers, these massive buildings occupy an unusual role in society. The Internet is so commonplace these days that most people when they shop from a web site or download an app don’t think for a second about where the infrastructure that executes those commands resides, or what fuel is burned to get that data to your screen. Being able to see up close the actual source that served up that Facebook page you just looked at is like exposing the inner workings of some hidden machine.

That world of connected server machines will only grow more massive as more people in China, India and Brazil get Internet connections and buy stuff online. More and more data centers will need to be built in close proximity to the Internet’s future users in mega cities like Beijing, Delhi, and Sao Paulo, and these data centers will be increasingly serving up traffic to mobile devices.

How, where and under what terms Internet companies build data centers will be a key to the future of their companies. Your music library might be housed in rural Maiden but you, as Apple’s customer, will insist on accessing it at lightening speed from anywhere in the world. As you listen to your favorite songs this week, and read over this series of articles, think about where that web page, song or photo is actually coming from, and what resources it took to bring it to you.

Below is a gallery of my photos from the trip. Also stay tuned for these stories this week:

On Tuesday: 10 reasons why Apple, Facebook & Google chose North Carolina for their data centers

On Wednesday: The controversial world of clean power and data centers

On Thursday: The story behind how Apple’s iCloud data center got built

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