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Apple Considering Building Huge New Data Center in Oregon
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East side, west side...
East side, west side, all about the town...glad to see Apple storing my precious data in more than one location. Hey, I think I'll buy some AAPL! (apologies, i am long AAPL).
East side, west side, all about the town...glad to see Apple storing my precious data in more than one location. Hey, I think I'll buy some AAPL! (apologies, i am long AAPL).
I'm just answering your question as to why a 12 hour battery could be useful. We have very little hydro penetration over here - not enough coast or rivers. We do have a pretty robust electricity market though and prices fluctuate - they're higher during peak load and low at night. If you pump during the night and sell it during the day, price you sell it for can offset the lost energy. Green energy also goes for a premium so you can store it and sell it to another utility that needs it to meet their renewable goals. It also gives grid operators flexibility. IE if a conventional generating unit goes down, they can dump from the hydro to cover load while maintenance fixes the broken unit.
You wouldnt know if MS had a datacenter - they open them very quietly, a bit like Google do. They have a lot more than you may think, shockingly they arent as narrowminded as Apple and open them across the globe.
Folks complaining that Apple opened their first data center on the East Coast of the US and their second data center on the West Coast seem to be missing the point. In no way does this mean they won't open one in Texas, or Europe, or Asia. They opened the first two far apart and near the densest concentrations of their customers. That's a really obvious thing to do. The next one will probably be Europe, Asia or Texas.
The choice or Oregon in particular seems fairly obvious since Oregon had more electric generation then the lines could carry for several weeks last spring during flood season and was struggling to REDUCE production.
Also, I didn't see any one mention that Apple already IS building solar capacity for their East Coast Data Center power needs.
The choice or Oregon in particular seems fairly obvious since Oregon had more electric generation then the lines could carry for several weeks last spring during flood season and was struggling to REDUCE production.
Also, I didn't see any one mention that Apple already IS building solar capacity for their East Coast Data Center power needs.
Optimised fro their customers in the USofA, while those in that iddy biddy RotW can go **** themselves!
Texas wouldn't be a likely spot. Whilst its a hotspot for datacenters, if Apple have DC's already on the East and West coast, the next logical place is the other side of the world, Europe or Asia - preferably both.
Wind, solar, and hydroelectric aren't all perfect, and their output is way way way less compared to fossil fuels, so if we reach a point of being more reliant on these forms of energy, power consumption and general energy usage will be a much bigger deal. Many fish die due to dams and a lot of birds die to windmills, although some designs are more animal friendly than others. Solar power is probably one of the cleanest, but I'm not sure what the output is like.
Bleh it's not just an issue of drinking water. Dams have killed a lot of animals in the past
.I'm sorry, you must be confusing me with someone else? You seem to think I stated or implied cars are green? Do point out where I talked about electro cars please....
I have visited coal burning power plants and in fact they pollute very little. He stated that the vents going into the sky let out steam not smoke. I mean come on what is with all the environmental talk? Global warming is a scam by the government so they can get money to support "the cause". The U.S. where people chant to save the trees and kill the children.
What's the name of the coal plant you visited?
And what is "the cause" and how is the government making money from it? If anything, the government is spending money to make these changes happen because they wouldn't happen otherwise.
The cloud is awesome, got my new Galaxy 10.1 at the weekend. I log into my Google account and all my emails, bookmarks and application get downloaded onto it. The Google cloud offering is brilliant, from what I have heard Apple are trying to copy this but struggling.
we are animals, just better ones.
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Governments are a scam by the Alien Brotherhood of Asnughsa. i Hope i don't get censored for this rem
Yes and no ...
I've already read a lot of complaints about this "lack of job creation" of data center facilities, and that's correct in one sense. (EG. Employment figures could be helped more in a given area if a manufacturing facility of comparable size was placed there instead.)
The thing is though, you have to take what you can get. It's not like a big manufacturer was competing for that data center's space and they turned them away. You're talking about places with nothing there, and then someone like Apple comes along and suggests building a data center there.
The local utility companies stand to benefit, if they're able to provide the capacity needed. (I know some of the plants near me have issues where they were originally designed under assumptions of a certain future demand for electricity that didn't pan out, so they run at only 50% capacity all the time. Much of the claimed problems of "too much demand for electricity" has nothing to do with power plants not capable of handling it. Rather, it's a distribution issue where power is needed too far from existing plants, and transmission lines can only carry so much at a time -- getting less efficient the longer a run they have to the destination.)
You also, presumably, have some indirect boosts to area employment. Sure, the data center might only hire 50 people or what-not ... but they're not always going to want to mail order EVERYTHING they ever need from out of state. It should at least occasionally create some work for construction people, when the building needs some maintenance done on it, for example.
I've already read a lot of complaints about this "lack of job creation" of data center facilities, and that's correct in one sense. (EG. Employment figures could be helped more in a given area if a manufacturing facility of comparable size was placed there instead.)
The thing is though, you have to take what you can get. It's not like a big manufacturer was competing for that data center's space and they turned them away. You're talking about places with nothing there, and then someone like Apple comes along and suggests building a data center there.
The local utility companies stand to benefit, if they're able to provide the capacity needed. (I know some of the plants near me have issues where they were originally designed under assumptions of a certain future demand for electricity that didn't pan out, so they run at only 50% capacity all the time. Much of the claimed problems of "too much demand for electricity" has nothing to do with power plants not capable of handling it. Rather, it's a distribution issue where power is needed too far from existing plants, and transmission lines can only carry so much at a time -- getting less efficient the longer a run they have to the destination.)
You also, presumably, have some indirect boosts to area employment. Sure, the data center might only hire 50 people or what-not ... but they're not always going to want to mail order EVERYTHING they ever need from out of state. It should at least occasionally create some work for construction people, when the building needs some maintenance done on it, for example.
Think beyond the library. Think about all the commuters during rush hour on the freeways polluting the air now becoming telecommuters. This is happening far more now than every before.
Great. One volcano or big earthquake, and there goes both iCloud and Facebook.
Wow, What about the freakin NC data center, did it just suddenly disappear ? Who cares about Facebook anyway ?
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BooHoo. If you're so worried, give up your space to the animals.
Going back to the data capacity density topic at the beginning of this thread...
I manage a certain Dell EqualLogic iSCSI device. After accounting for RAID 50 redundancy and two hot spares, it'll serve up 23.23 Terabytes in 4U of rack space. (All capacity numbers in this post use the base-10 nomenclature, so 1 Tb = 10^12 bytes.) Given that 10 of these will fit in a standard 42U rack, that's 232.32 Tb per rack. To store 1 Exabyte, you'll need 4304 racks. At four square feet per rack, you're looking at 17,217 square feet of floorspace. (Another way of thinking about it is you'd need 86 rows of 50 racks. With a row every third floor tile, you're looking at (50*2) * (86*3*2) = 51,600 sq ft.) That's large but nor crazy large. Obviously that doesn't include power, cooling, and other infrastructure needs like redundancy, network, servers, tape libraries, office space, etc., but Amazon's Oregon datacenter is 116,000 sq ft I've read, so storing 1 Exabyte there isn't a floorspace issue.
Also, Apple claims "over 20 million songs" available via iTunes. At an average of 4 minutes per song (an assumption based on a Google search) and 256 Kbps, that's only 1.2288 Petabytes, or a little more than four racks worth of storage using the above device.
And finally, if we assume 200 million iOS devices each provisioned with 5 Gb of iCloud storage, we're talking the 1 Exabyte number. Not including redundancy which increases requirements, deduplication which decreases them, etc.
My guess for Apple's usable data storage capacity at their datacenter? One or two hundred Petabytes. YMMV. <shrug> (Feel free, btw, to check and correct my math and assumptions - I want to be factually accurate as possible and would hate to be off by 1000. Except for my final guess of course. )
I manage a certain Dell EqualLogic iSCSI device. After accounting for RAID 50 redundancy and two hot spares, it'll serve up 23.23 Terabytes in 4U of rack space. (All capacity numbers in this post use the base-10 nomenclature, so 1 Tb = 10^12 bytes.) Given that 10 of these will fit in a standard 42U rack, that's 232.32 Tb per rack. To store 1 Exabyte, you'll need 4304 racks. At four square feet per rack, you're looking at 17,217 square feet of floorspace. (Another way of thinking about it is you'd need 86 rows of 50 racks. With a row every third floor tile, you're looking at (50*2) * (86*3*2) = 51,600 sq ft.) That's large but nor crazy large. Obviously that doesn't include power, cooling, and other infrastructure needs like redundancy, network, servers, tape libraries, office space, etc., but Amazon's Oregon datacenter is 116,000 sq ft I've read, so storing 1 Exabyte there isn't a floorspace issue.
Also, Apple claims "over 20 million songs" available via iTunes. At an average of 4 minutes per song (an assumption based on a Google search) and 256 Kbps, that's only 1.2288 Petabytes, or a little more than four racks worth of storage using the above device.
And finally, if we assume 200 million iOS devices each provisioned with 5 Gb of iCloud storage, we're talking the 1 Exabyte number. Not including redundancy which increases requirements, deduplication which decreases them, etc.
My guess for Apple's usable data storage capacity at their datacenter? One or two hundred Petabytes. YMMV. <shrug> (Feel free, btw, to check and correct my math and assumptions - I want to be factually accurate as possible and would hate to be off by 1000. Except for my final guess of course.
)Hilsboro and the surrounding area have Portland land constraints, Portland taxes and Portland weather.
Positive points about Prineville (or the surrounding area) for this purpose:
1. Prineville is cold ("brutally cold" to those who are used to moderate weather) six months out of the year, so cooling costs should be decreased.
2. Land is available and cheap, so 160 acres is an easily attained parcel, and more could be obtained if they decide to expand for a solar farm or some such thing.
3. Property taxes are very low because of the small population and amount of land owned by the average local resident.
4. It is in the desert, so it doesn't rain much (much less so than the rest of Oregon, anyway).
5. I don't know about the specific plot of land that Apple is looking at, but much of the surrounding area can't have dwelling structures built on it because it contains a high density of spewed volcanic rock and old lava flows. I would think that such a thing would be good for a company that is looking to potentially build a solar farm -- lots of land that can't be built on otherwise.
About alternate power sources... At least one poster suggested the use of hydroelectric power, and there are several rivers in the Prineville area, but there is a growing movement in Oregon to remove existing dams because they destroy the ecosystem. Many dams in Oregon have been removed over the past decade, and most others will probably be removed in the next decade. Dams are very unpopular (the key question being whether that particular alternate energy source is worth the damaage it causes) out here, and it is very unlikely that any new ones will ever be built in the state of Oregon. We like our salmon.
Nice factual post. You know you are anal about accuracy when you actually state you are working in base 10.(All capacity numbers in this post use the base-10 nomenclature, so 1 Tb = 10^12 bytes.)
(Feel free, btw, to check and correct my math and assumptions - I want to be factually accurate as possible and would hate to be off by 1000. Except for my final guess of course.