GigaOM » North Carolina

How RST Global is building an underground fiber network at half the cost

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:10:06 +0000

Fiber-to-the-home has come to Shelby, North Carolina, in the form of a new network from RST Global Communications. The network already passes 20,000 homes and was built underground for half of what a traditional underground fiber network would cost, according to the founder of RST. The secret is using an older deployment technology outfitted with today’s cheap consumer electronics to drill 10 feet underground with minimal human labor — cutting the cost of deploying fiber.

Facebook’s data center in North Carolina.

RST Global (it’s short for Really Scalable Technologies), which was formed in 2009 by a former cable network engineer and two other backers, has big plans for bringing better broadband to the people of North and South Carolina. Dan Limerick, CEO of RST Global, told me that the goal is to bring fiber to the home for residential customers, starting at prices of less than $60 for a symmetrical 50 Mbps connection and going up depending on the speeds. It will offer multigigabit connections to businesses and the many data center customers that are located in the Carolinas. Wipro is already a RTG customer, hooking one of its data centers to the network. New data centers built by Google, Facebook and Apple are only 30 miles away, and RST plans to go there as well.

RTG may never reach its goal of reaching all 14.3 million people in both states, but it has gotten started thanks to an undisclosed, “multimillion-dollar” investment from the three founders. The company says it has designed a network, a deployment model and is using a new twist on old ways of drilling to install cable to reduce the cost of deploying fiber to the home.

Old tech with new, cheaper functionality.

Randy Revels, the CTO of RST, explains that the network uses GPON technology like Verizon does in its fiber network, but that it isn’t spliced in as many places like the FIOS network is. In the Verizon network, fiber is spliced together multiple times between the Internet exchange point and the customer’s home. In the RST network, a continuous fused fiber network connected back to the Internet backbone is laid along the routes. When a customer calls and wants to be added to the network, a technician comes out, digs the trenches to the home or business and connect the building to the main fiber line. That means there are fewer connectors and splices in the fiber, which means less gear.

A customer may have to wait two weeks after calling before they get hooked into the network, but this way RST, like Google, only incurs the expense of building out a home when someone is ready to subscribe to the service. For a traditional telco network, the deployment goal was to pass all of the homes in one-go and then install the last few feet and gear when the customer called, but at the back end the network had to be provisioned for all the customers to sign up. That decision has influenced the network design and cost, resulting in more gear costs up front.

But the biggest reduction in cost is new technology put to use on drills used to run the fiber underground. Using a chip and camera inside the drill head, an operator can maneuver the drill underground to avoid obstacles. Because that tech has improved so much and is cheaper, RST has chosen to dig the entire network that way, bypassing aerial fiber strung from telephone poles. This adds security and makes it less repair-prone, but it also helps RST avoid deals with potential competitors and municipalities in order to get on the telephone poles. Even Google’s fiber network in Kansas City hit a bit of a snag when it came to getting its fiber on poles.

Fiber is the future, for real.

Limerick says the cost of homes passed for RST is much less than $1,500 per home averaged across both rural and urban areas, which is about half of what some analysts think Google spent and in line with what analysts estimated that Verizon spent. But that’s still $30 million when you multiply it by the 20,000 homes the network reaches. But Limerick and his co-founders Revels and Doug Brown, are convinced the Carolinas need it.

“Imagine if you have full-blown uncompressed HD TV on three screens, and have home monitoring cameras, and home automation data and smart grid and everything else. Telemedicine and robotic surgery that can already be done today and when you add that up you can’t get it through a cable modem. You need fiber,” Revels said.

Thus, he and his partners are taking their money and putting it 10 feet underground, building out an all-fiber network that stretches from the last mile to the middle mile and meets the places where the internet backbone begins. “This has to be built in the U.S. sooner or later and we are starting with this footprint so we can show a test model so people can see how versatile and all encompassing this is compared to networks today,” Limerick said.

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State tries to ban online teacher torment

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 23:03:53 +0000

Since cyber-bullying became part of the school landscape, states have tried to put in rules to protect students. Now North Carolina wants to do the same for its teachers.

Under a proposed law, students who use the internet to “torment or intimated a school employee” can be convicted of a misdemeanor and fined $1000. This law says such torment can include building a “fake profile or website,” posting a “real or doctored image” or signing up a teacher for an online porn site.

The proposal comes as courts are trying to balance students’ free speech rights against a rise in online abuse directed at school officials. In one case, a court sided with a student who made a parody site with his principal’s picture and phrases like “steroid freak” and “big whore.”

See also: Can a school get your kid’s Facebook password?

While students have always mocked school figures, online media can produce insults that are especially cruel and widespread. In college, I recall seeing a professor consoling a crying librarian who had found a website on which students disparaged her appearance and more.

The proposed North Carolina law, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, appears well-intentioned but may fail First Amendment scrutiny. As always in these situations, there may be a will to stamp out cyber-bullying but not a way.

(Image by tommaso lizzul via Shutterstock)

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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 story behind how Apple’s iCloud data center got built

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 07:00:34 +0000

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

Apple’s new $1 billion data center — one of the highest-profile new data centers in the world — has put the town of Maiden, North Carolina (population: just over 3,000) on the tech map. But it almost didn’t get built.

Economic development officials in Catawba County, and a data center development group, had been talking with Apple for months to get the company interested in setting up its data center in town. Then the developer spent months making sure that an abandoned mill building — a remnant of the region’s days as a vibrant textile manufacturing area — would be ready to house the new facility.

But as Apple executives got closer to making a decision, they suddenly decided that the building was just too small. It looked like Apple was going to have to go elsewhere for its massive 500,000 square-foot iCloud data center.

However, the county had one more shot: Just three miles down the road, it had been developing a 180-acre park that they envisioned would be a campus to a handful of data centers. Faced with the possibility of seeing Apple walk, the county changed tack, and offered it the entire park.

Scott Millar, President of the Catawba County Economic Development Group

“We almost lost it,” says the President of the Catawba County Economic Development group, Scott Millar, who has a background in advertising and a penchant for crossword puzzles. That would have been a major missed opportunity — at the peak of construction of Apple’s data center there were 1,400 construction workers on-site on a single day, says Millar. But beyond just the construction jobs, Apple’s influence — as one of the world’s largest and most-watched tech companies — is enormous. “It gave us the ability to be able to convince others to locate here, too,” says Millar, adding, “They are a powerful company.”

As I’ve laid out in this series of articles, North Carolina has emerged as one of the newest mega data center clusters in the U.S., attracting business from Apple, Google, Facebook, AT&T, Wipro and others, thanks in part to the state’s cheap and reliable power and aggressive tax incentives.

Google kicks it off

In Maiden, it all started with Google. Millar and his team fought for the search company’s data center back in the 2005/2006 timeframe, eventually losing out to Lenoir, in Caldwell County, just 30 miles southeast.

But partly because of Google’s interest, the local utility Duke Energy started courting tech companies to build data centers, says Tom Williams, a spokesperson for Duke Energy. Data centers are attractive customers to utilities because they buy a large, and consistent, amount of power. Some industrial power customers, or even residential homes, have spikey — or inconsistent — energy demands, which can be hard for utilities to predict. Data centers, on the other hand, have a relatively set temperature and a set amount of servers to power, and their needs are mostly predictable. They also use power 24/7. Utilities like both of these features.

The sign in front of Google’s data center

The possibility of Google’s business also helped prompt Millar and his team to go searching for a site that could be transformed into a data center park. The site they found, off of Startown Road, is the one that years later Apple settled on.

Millar and the county also helped Duke Energy begin aggressive marketing aimed at data centers, helping organize an annual site tour for tech companies called The Data Center Information Exchange, which is now in its 7th year; it attracts about 50 data center bigwigs a year. The county also created Datacentersites.com to show off the Startown Road park as well as other potential sites.

Tech companies that build data centers tend to go where others have gone before — the decision-makers generally feel more comfortable making what could be a billion-dollar decision if another company has already made it before them. In addition, once the needed fiber lines are built out to connect a data center in an area, other data centers can use those communication links for their data backbones.

With Millar’s advertising background, he started promoting the region as the North Carolina data center cluster: “We coined that term and started urging other communities to start using it,” he says.

What comes after manufacturing?

It was clear the area needed a new industry. In the 1960’s, 70′s and 80′s, the region had been a leader in manufacturing of textiles and furniture. In the 90’s, fiber cable production companies set up shop there as well. But the changing global economy has led to a massive contraction in the area’s textile and furniture-making sectors — and much of that business went overseas to China and Vietnam. The dotcom bust led to the exodus of the fiber folks, too.

The region’s unemployment spiked to 16 percent in the recession of 2008, says Millar. That has slowly inched back down in recent years. Data centers, which can provide hundreds of jobs during construction and dozens of jobs during operation, have helped.

Downtown Maiden, North Carolina

But they haven’t solved the problem. The manufacturing jobs that dominated the area in the previous decades, like a furniture-making plant or a textile mill, provided thousands of jobs and propped up generations. The jobs were labor-intensive, and required training, but didn’t require a college education or higher degrees.

Contrast that with data centers, which when fully built offer dozens of highly skilled jobs to engineers and other highly skilled professionals. In its first year of operation, the Apple data center employed 67 full time “badged” workers. Facebook, likewise, has 60 full-time workers for the first building of its two-building data center complex.

The reality is that data centers don’t directly provide enough jobs to come even close to making up for the area’s manufacturing bust. “We led the nation in the percentage of workforce involved in manufacturing in the late 1980’s,” says Millar. That, unfortunately, will never return.

Still, there are a lot of indirect benefits of creating a data center cluster. The thousands of construction workers that built the data centers shopped in the local markets and ate at the local restaurants. And Millar and the county are hoping to use the cluster to attract more niche data center operators, like those storing health data, and firms analyzing big data.

Millar says he’s working with another unannounced data center company that could bring many more service jobs to the region through a service center. The idea is to go beyond just the Internet service providers like Google, says Millar, and predict the future of where the Internet and IT is going.

A lucky break

Workers building out power lines around Apple’s data center and solar farm

It was a couple of data center developers who joined one of the The Data Center Information Exchange tours that first brought Apple to Catawba county. T5 Partners, which specializes in building, owning and operating data centers, already had a relationship with Apple and saw the benefits of the low cost, reliable power in North Carolina.

But Apple landed in the town through a combination of targeted marketing, state and local incentives, the area’s existing resources, and a little bit of luck. A year before the county almost lost Apple through the Carolina Mills pitch, Millar says he almost sold off the 180-acre park to a titanium maker. “We were marketing it as a data center park, but if someone else had wanted to buy it, would I have sold it off? Heck yeah.”

In the end, the county acted more like a nimble web startup than a bureaucratic government agency, taking risks, predicting how the future would unfold, and remaking itself. Turns out the Silicon Valley pivot is alive and well in this Southern county.

When I ask Millar what advice he would give to the regions that want to help bring industry to their areas in similar ways, he’s at first hesitant to give advice. He doesn’t want tons of communities copying what Catawba has done. But after a moment he says: “Examine your assets that are existing, find new assets that are going to make sense to the clients, and go ahead and push your chips into that corner.”

Essentially make a smart bet. And who knows: maybe an early gamble on a new sector could deliver an Apple-style win like it did in Catawba County.

Here’s the rest of the 4-part series from this week:

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The controversial world of clean power and data centers

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 07:00:17 +0000

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

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

Over the past several years, a couple-hundred-mile area north of Charlotte, North Carolina, has emerged as a new hub for massive data centers that power the Internet, attracting industry heavyweights like Apple, Google and Facebook. North Carolina has been able win over those companies despite the fact it generates its power largely from dirty coal and nuclear, which runs counter to a general trend toward a desire for greener sources of energy.

As the world demands more clean energy, will North Carolina continue to attract these types of mega data center deals? Or will areas that can provide more grid-connected clean power win out?

These are questions I pondered as I took a day-long road trip around North Carolina’s new mega data center cluster last month. To me, the state’s data center corridor represents a transition in how the leading Internet companies have come to think about clean power.

When Google started looking at building its site in North Carolina in 2006 (announced in early 2007) clean power wasn’t at the top of mind for even the leading Internet companies. Gary Demasi, who has led Google’s efforts purchasing clean power for data centers, told me in an interview recently: At the time “we were cognizant of the [energy] generation mix [of the state]. We’ve gotten more proactive and aggressive since then.”

Three years later, by 2009, when Apple and Facebook were making their decisions to build in the state, it was still an early idea. But by the time word got out in late 2011 about Apple’s massive solar farm in the area, the shift in thinking about clean power and data centers had begun to occur. Some Internet leaders like Google now have goals to get roughly a third of their power for data centers directly from clean power. Apple is pledging to have some of its new data centers powered by 100 percent clean power, from both direct consumption and clean power purchasing.

The problem with clean power and data centers

Here’s the rub with clean power and data centers: Data centers consume large amounts of power — some 2 percent of the total electricity in the U.S. as of 2010 — and this consumption will only grow as more web services are put in the cloud. Dirty power from sources like coal is cheap, readily available, and provides power 24/7, or what’s called baseload power. So it’s a perfect fit for data centers.

Clean power sources, like solar and wind, are more expensive right now in many regions, are only readily available in certain locations, and only provide power when the sun shines or the wind blows. One of the only clean power sources that’s cheap and provides baseload power is hydro (dams), and that’s only plentiful in a few regions in the U.S., like Washington state, or near Canada and New York.

Utilities like Duke Energy, which sells power to the Internet companies in North Carolina, are highly regulated, and they need aggressive state incentives to get them to add more clean power to their grids. North Carolina only gets 4 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, with coal at 61 percent and nuclear at 31 percent, according to a Greenpeace report, and that generation mix isn’t expected to change at least by 2030.

Utilities have long maintained that data center operators aren’t willing to pay a premium for clean power. And for many years they haven’t. The small number of data centers operators that have picked areas where they can run off carbon emissions-free electricity like hydro have only done so because that clean power has been as cheap as dirty power. Hydro can be as cheap as 3 cents per kilowatt hour, according to a GigaOM Pro report (subscription required), which is even cheaper than the 4 to 6 cents per kilowatt hour for power in North Carolina. The town of Quincy, Washington, has attracted companies like Microsoft, Dell and Yahoo that want to run data centers off of this clean hydro power in the Pacific Northwest.

But Internet companies need data centers in various places — in proximity to their different large user bases. While Google keeps the amount and location of some of its data centers under wraps, it details at least 11 data centers throughout the world, could have 20 to 30 according to some estimates, or as many as 40 according to this Wired article.

Power lines around Google’s data center in Lenoir

Most data centers are as clean or dirty as the local power grid supply because that’s what they draw off. Apple’s massive onsite solar farm here is the industry exception.

Time of transition

Many of the biggest Internet companies are now concluding that they need to consider clean power in their data center plans to show their commitment to sustainability. Some of them, like Google, are aiming to have a third of their data center power come directly from clean power, while Apple is shooting for 100 percent clean power for some of its facilities via a variety of methods.

At the same time, the price of solar panels has plummeted over the past year, to the point where they can provide an increasingly competitive (and fixed) price of electricity with a long-term contract in a region with strong government incentives. The cost for electricity from solar panels today can be anywhere from 13 to 30 cents per kilowatt hour, depending on the contract and location, according to numbers from GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Bloomberg New Energy finance says that they’re seeing contracts for solar panel farms planned for 2016 as low as 7 to 9 cents per kilowatt hour.

The trend has also been helped by environmentalists like Greenpeace. In early 2011 Facebook became the subject of a Greenpeace campaign to try to get the social network giant to “unfriend coal,” or stop building its data centers in coal-power regions. At one point Greenpeace said it was competing for a Guinness World Record for the most comments ever on its post about how Facebook should “unfriend coal.”

Facebook seemed to listen. Late last year, it agreed to move clean power up the list of factors it weighs in choosing where to build data centers. Around the same time, Facebook announced that it would build its next data center in Lulea, Sweden, partly because of the abundant low-cost clean power of the area (it’s got hydropower from dams in spades).

Greenpeace has also targeted Apple, and its data center in North Carolina, and Greenpeace has a report coming out on Thursday that looks at the details — or lack there of — of Apple’s 100 percent clean power plan. Greenpeace wants Apple to meet a few criteria including: to use the clean power from its solar farm directly for the data center, and not sell it to Duke Energy, to find a source for biogas for its fuel cells to be used directly, to adopt a siting policy for data centers that emphasizes clean energy, to find additional sources of clean power generation for data centers instead of buying renewable energy credits, and finally to push Duke to put cleaner electricity on the grid.

Finally, as data center operators build more and more facilities and consume more and more energy, they’re finding that diversifying their energy mix can hedge against a potential spike in power prices — say, if natural gas costs suddenly soar, or a carbon policy ever drives up the price of coal.

Data centers consumed around 2 percent of the electricity in the U.S. in 2010, somewhere between 67 and 86 billion kilowatt hours per year, according to researcher Jonathan Koomey, who produced the study. And that number will only grow in the coming years. If even a part of that electricity came from clean power sources, the carbon emissions reduced could be substantial. But perhaps more than the actual carbon emissions reduction, the choices that the leading Internet companies make may be examples for other companies and industries to follow.

“I’ve been asking utilities for over a decade to offer a green power option to myself and my clients. It’s been rather lacking,” long-time data center developer executive K.C. Mares explained to me in an interview. “In their defense, the companies haven’t been willing to pay the extra price. But it’s my belief that there will be more takers over time, particularly as part of targeted efforts to capture or retain data center companies that want to purchase green power.” In recent months, Mares helped attract Apple’s next big $1 billion data center project to the Reno Technology Park, which looks to have ample clean power options available already at the site.

The sign in front of Google’s data center

Grid-connected vs off-grid clean power

At this point, Apple seems to mostly stand alone in its desire to build such massive clean power plants next to a data center. The only other firm to announce that it will tackle something similar is eBay. Last month eBay announced that it would build an extension to one of its data centers in Utah that would run off 30 fuel cells, powered by biogas, and use the grid as backup power.

Google’s data center in Lenoir

Google has arguably been the most innovative and aggressive web business when it comes to clean power. But Google’s Demasi told me that Google has “a basic philosophy that renewable energy should be provided through the utility.”

Likewise Facebook’s VP of Site Operations Tom Furlong, told me: “The utility is the obvious location [for clean power]. It would be a lot easier if the utility came to the site with 20 percent renewables and said this is our mix.” Facebook’s sustainability guru Bill Weihl (formerly of Google) emphasizes that Facebook is still working out its strategy for clean power for data centers and he isn’t ruling out onsite clean-power generation. But Weihl also says he’s interested in one day possibly creating an industry trade group that could help bring together companies to influence utilities’ grid choices through the group purchasing of clean power.

Onsite generation won’t be a fit for many data center operators. Facebook already experimented with a tiny (100 kilowatt) onsite solar farm at its data center in Prineville, and discovered that developing clean power can be tough, due to the complexities inherent in solar projects, as well as Facebook’s inexperience with it. “It was hard and incredibly illuminating, and it was more costly than we ever expected,” Furlong said. Facebook also looked into using fuel cells at its data center in Oregon, but the economics didn’t make sense to them, says Furlong.

On Apple’s decision to use fuel cells in North Carolina, Weihl says: “I’d love to know more about how they are making the economics work. Certainly based on the analysis that I’ve done in the past, it doesn’t seem like it would be even close. But they may have figured out something the rest of us haven’t.”

It may be that Apple isn’t making the economics “work” for clean power, and perhaps has just decided to pay a premium for it — at least in North Carolina. The two 20 MW solar farms combined probably cost Apple somewhere around $150 million (other 40 MW farms have cost that much), and the fuel-cell farm potentially another maybe $20 million (those are my estimates). Then the question is, would that added expense come to more or less than if Apple sited its data center in a region with higher, and cleaner, power prices?

Apple says it’s planning to use biogas to power the fuel cells at its data centers (as is eBay), albeit it likely indirectly (the biogas will probably get injected into a natural gas line, not directly into the fuel cells). While natural gas (a fossil fuel) can more easily be used instead, biogas comes from the decomposition of organic waste and is carbon emissions free. But with natural gas prices at some of the lowest in history, biogas is a far more expensive choice. That can’t be seen as an economic choice at all.

Apple, as one of the world’s most successful tech companies, is one of a very small list of companies that could afford to invest this much into clean power — Google is another. While questions still remain about how exactly Apple will meet its 100 percent clean power data centers goals (see Greenpeace report out tomorrow), Apple is clearly acting as a pioneer. And the move could have profound effects on the rest of the tech sector. It already has.

Here’s the rest of the 4-part series this week:

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10 reasons Apple, Facebook & Google chose North Carolina for their mega data centers

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 07:00:31 +0000

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

If you live on the East Coast, there’s a decent chance that when you log into Facebook, the photos, comments and Likes that you see are being served up from a data center in the quiet, rural town of Forest City, North Carolina. Three months ago, Facebook flipped the switch on the first of two buildings here.

Facebook isn’t the only Internet giant that chose the so-called North Carolina data center corridor as home for one of its most important server farms. Within a couple-hundred-mile radius, Google and Apple have also built mega data centers, as have Wipro, Disney, AT&T and others.

Deciding where to build a data center has always been a complex decision. “We consider probably 50 different factors when we pick a site for one of our data centers,” says Tom Furlong, VP of site operations at Facebook. According to a GigaOM Pro report (subscription required), Microsoft has 43 criteria for its selection process.

But that decision has become increasingly complex as companies begin to factor in access to clean power and a growing population of Internet users in developing markets. Add to that decision the notion that webscale computing is fundamentally changing how servers are built

Around the Apple data center, substations are needed. Data centers consume a lot of power.

and connected and the decision becomes even more complicated. The data center has blown up, according to execs at our recent Structure conference.

We interviewed executives at some of the biggest Internet companies, as well as hardware vendors, economic development groups, and utilities to find out why North Carolina has emerged as a hub for data centers. Here are the 10 biggest reasons:

1). Low-cost power: You need to be able to offer electricity at the price of 4 cents to 6 cents per kilowatt hour before the data center operators will even talk to you, says Duke Energy spokesperson Thomas Williams. That’s how much it costs in North Carolina and that’s far below the national U.S. average. Part of the reason why the power is so cheap in North Carolina is because the electricity mix is 61 percent from coal, 31 percent from nuclear, and only 4 percent from clean power. Coal and nuclear are some of the cheapest forms of electricity generation.

2). Reliable and available power: These data centers are huge — as big as 500,000 square feet for Apple’s — and it’s tough to find places that have enough power transmission capacity available, says Facebook’s Furlong. The area around Charlotte, North Carolina (Duke’s headquarters), already had much of this capacity built out. As the textile industry in the area has contracted, and the local manufacturing and furniture production industries increasingly moved offshore, that has freed up capacity.

Because of that, Duke had extra industrial-sized capacity that was ready to be connected to the data centers, which commonly require energy of anywhere between 20 MW to as high as 100 MW. To put that in perspective Apple says its 40 MW of solar panels, and 5 MW of fuel cell power, will provide enough power for almost 11,000 homes per year.

Maiden, NC

3). Rural areas: A significant amount of North Carolina is rural, and that land is relatively inexpensive and available for large buildings and huge power substations. Data centers and populated areas don’t tend to go together; when they do intersect, they tend to lead to ‘Not in My Backyard’ push back from the local communities. Even in Maiden, a town of just over 3,000 people, about 60 miles northwest from Charlotte, residents are starting to complain about the construction of Apple’s solar farm — particularly the leveling of some 200 acres (over two locations) for the solar panels.

4). Incentives from counties and the state: North Carolina law gives the state the ability to reduce sales tax on servers, says Furlong. That was a factor for all the Internet players that chose the area. When you have to buy new servers every three to five years those savings can add up.

North Carolina’s legislature approved $46 million in tax breaks for Apple, and local governments slashed Apple’s real estate taxes by 50 percent and property taxes by 85 percent, according to Greenpeace. Google (which was the first in the area, back in 2006) scored about $212 million in savings over 30 years, reported Bloomberg a couple years ago. That included tax breaks, infrastructure upgrades, and other incentives. Bloomberg reported that Google received “more than $1 million for each of the 210 jobs Google said it eventually hoped to create in Lenoir.”

Facebook’s data center

5). Available water: Water is always a factor when picking sites for data centers, and North Carolina has an abundance of rivers and moisture, said Facebook’s Furlong. Water is more crucial for some projects than others, like if it’s a warmer environment and the data center needs extra water for cooling. At the Forest City, North Carolina, site, Facebook is deploying evaporative cooling, which requires a mist spray of water to cool the air as it’s entering the data center.

Google has said that evaporative cooling commonly can use “hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day,” and that’s why Google is looking at using recycled waste-water at some of its facilities. At Facebook’s data center in Oregon, it built a well onsite to provide water for evaporative cooling and that helps the company mitigate its use of the city’s water resources.

6). Fast deployment: Apple’s data center in Maiden was built within about a year from the time the site was selected, according to Scott Millar, President of the Economic Development Group for Catawaba County, which includes Maiden. That’s because the county had already developed a plot of land for a data center park. Likewise, Forest City also had a ready-to-go business park that it made available to Facebook for its data center. When searching for a site, we’ll “find that there are places where it just takes too long to build it,” says Furlong. My response to them is: “I’m sorry, my development horizon is just not that long.”

7). East Coast traffic: Internet companies are choosing North Carolina because they need a location close to the East Coast. The speed at which a web page is delivered is a major competitive factor for giant Internet companies — a couple milliseconds too slow can rule out a location. North Carolina can provide a quick enough web-serving turnaround for East Coast customers, as could many other locations close to the East Coast.

8). Close to an airport, major city: Data centers, like many big infrastructure projects, need to be accessible for employees as well as for goods and services. Access to the Charlotte airport and the city of Charlotte was a significant driver for the Internet firms. During the height of construction of the data centers, some 600 to 800 workers are involved, and during operation there can generally be 50 to 100 workers.

Workers building out power lines around Apple’s data center and solar farm

9). The Lemming effect: Catawba County’s Millar says there tends to be a clustering effect with data center operators. When one or two big ones come in, the others feel more comfortable following. That’s because the executive, or team, that has to pitch the data center location to the rest of the company and the board feels safer choosing a spot that has already been validated as a successful site. When making hundred-million-dollar – or even billion-dollar – decisions, it’s not surprising that companies try to de-risk the decision by following other companies, says Millar. Other resources in areas can be shared between data centers, like fiber data links.

10). The climate: While North Carolina isn’t exactly cold, Facebook’s Furlong told me that it was one of the only areas on the East Coast where it wasn’t so hot and humid to preclude open air cooling. That allows companies to get rid of the bulk of the power-hungry air conditioners that cool most data centers, and instead use the outside air for cooling, which uses a lot less energy. At the Forest City data center, Facebook cools the air as it enters with a water spray. For the rare occasion that the weather gets too hot or humid, Facebook has built a set of coils that cool the warm moist air as it enters.

Here’s the rest of the 4-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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Apple’s NC data center: transparency and the pressure to go green

Adam Lesser — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:00:58 +0000

Buried in last week’s catfight between Apple and Greenpeace over the energy sourcing for Apple’s new North Carolina data center and how clean it would be, was a surprising fact—that the conversation between Apple and Greenpeace was happening at all.
Apple almost never reveals early details of [...]

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U.S. Cellular launching LTE in March with 2 Samsung gadgets

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:19:32 +0000

Soon consumers in smaller towns and cities across the U.S. will have access to their first LTE network as U.S. Cellular ramps ups its commercial 4G service. The regional CDMA operator will start selling two Samsung devices – the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in March and the Galaxy S Aviator smartphone in April — making the odd move of launching a connected tablet before it releases its first 4G phone.

The network will go live in several small communities in Iowa, Wisconsin, Maine, North Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma, as well as in some of U.S. Cellular’s bigger markets such as Milwaukee, Madison and Racine, Wis.; Des Moines, Iowa; Portland, Maine; and Greenville, N.C. (You can see full coverage maps here.) U.S. Cellular said the launch will cover 25 percent of its CDMA footprint, which currently serves 6.1 million customers.

The big exception on that list is Chicago, the carrier’s largest market and headquarters. When U.S. Cellular and its spectrum partner King Street Wireless bought their 700 MHz 4G licenses at auction in 2008, they failed to win a key Chicago license, leaving a big hole in the operator’s 4G footprint. They appear to be working to rectifying that situation though. U.S. Cellular and Verizon Wireless are currently negotiating a spectrum swap that could put a critical 700 MHz Windy City license in regional operator’s hands.

U.S. Cellular said in many of its smaller launch markets, customers will see their first LTE service, though Verizon’s juggernaut 4G rollout has already beaten the carrier to many of the bigger towns like Milwaukee, Des Moines and Greenville. U.S. Cellular also didn’t reveal any details on how it would price the service, though its current 3G plans offer a hint. U.S. Cellular sells a 5 GB stand-alone tablet plan for $55 a month, and it bundles 5 GB in with its smartphone voice and SMS plans for about $40 a month.

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