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Apple to Build $1 Billion Server Farm in NC
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Yes, it's a tax break. But there will be other direct expenses to North Carolina's taxpayers. The full extent of these expenses are unclear as of yet, but previous commenters have noted what some of them might be.
If Apple did not receive a tax break, they would have still built the data center somewhere. Taxpayers somewhere -- it happens to be North Carolina -- are receiving $46 million less in tax revenue from a company with tens of billions in the bank. Much of the criticism here is that local governments are bidding against each other in a negative-sum game, to hand out tax breaks and often cash simply to steer committed projects across unmarked boundary lines. The whole concept of local governments bidding against each other is rotten and corrupt, and it's against the interests of taxpayers generally. It's massive corporate welfare, and it needs to stop.
It's also worth mentioning that most electricity comes from coal in the United States. Apple's new data center will increase coal burning and thus pollution. So that's another "benefit" North Carolinians -- and anyone else downwind -- get to enjoy. All for a whopping 50 "permanent" jobs that go to North Carolina instead of Kansas or Maryland or some other state.
If Apple did not receive a tax break, they would have still built the data center somewhere. Taxpayers somewhere -- it happens to be North Carolina -- are receiving $46 million less in tax revenue from a company with tens of billions in the bank. Much of the criticism here is that local governments are bidding against each other in a negative-sum game, to hand out tax breaks and often cash simply to steer committed projects across unmarked boundary lines. The whole concept of local governments bidding against each other is rotten and corrupt, and it's against the interests of taxpayers generally. It's massive corporate welfare, and it needs to stop.
It's also worth mentioning that most electricity comes from coal in the United States. Apple's new data center will increase coal burning and thus pollution. So that's another "benefit" North Carolinians -- and anyone else downwind -- get to enjoy. All for a whopping 50 "permanent" jobs that go to North Carolina instead of Kansas or Maryland or some other state.
... and California has higher rates for electricity, and those pesky fault lines.
The tax-break isn't exactly anything new - corporations like Apple held all the cards for some time now, with states/countries falling over each other to offer the best terms. Great for the corporations, good for the country that wins (but not as good as it could be).
It's a bit like Apple's site in Ireland, they claimed they set it up due to the English speaking and well-educated workforce; but no doubt it was mostly due to Ireland's very low corporate tax rate and government inducements. When wages rose here, they moved most of the facilities to Taiwan. Easy come, easy go. They still have a large facility here, so presumably, over the 20 or so years, it has been a net benefit to the community.
It's a bit like Apple's site in Ireland, they claimed they set it up due to the English speaking and well-educated workforce; but no doubt it was mostly due to Ireland's very low corporate tax rate and government inducements. When wages rose here, they moved most of the facilities to Taiwan. Easy come, easy go. They still have a large facility here, so presumably, over the 20 or so years, it has been a net benefit to the community.
So now its not a loss of income issue, its an energy and pollution issue? Why all the complaining? As I said before, even if NC only gets a few million a year in taxes, isn't that better than nothing? How can you lament the loss of "potential" tax revenue if you've never had it? You are an idiot.
BTW Nostradamus, I am pretty sure Maiden NC gets its power from the Duke Energy Cowens Ford Hydro Station on Lake Norman, or at worst, from the McGuire Nuclear station, also on Lake Norman. Neither of which are coal.
-NC dweller
So now its not a loss of income issue, its an energy and pollution issue? Why all the complaining? As I said before, even if NC only gets a few million a year in taxes, isn't that better than nothing? How can you lament the loss of "potential" tax revenue if you've never had it? You are an idiot.
BTW Nostradamus, I am pretty sure Maiden NC gets its power from the Duke Energy Cowens Ford Hydro Station on Lake Norman, or at worst, from the McGuire Nuclear station, also on Lake Norman. Neither of which are coal, so please know what you are talking about before acting like a moron.
-NC dweller
OH SNAP
What the hell are you talking about, Apple doesn't have $60 billion or anywhere near that.
From the Maiden, NC, website:
"Maiden is a member of North Carolina Municipal Power Agency 1, which obtains power from the Catawba Nuclear Station. This association provides Maiden with an abundance of base load generation."
I believe that about 1/3 of North Carolina electric power comes from nuclear plants.
"Maiden is a member of North Carolina Municipal Power Agency 1, which obtains power from the Catawba Nuclear Station. This association provides Maiden with an abundance of base load generation."
I believe that about 1/3 of North Carolina electric power comes from nuclear plants.
Apparently Apple was short on cash, now the Town & County have combined to offer them an extra $20 million in tax breaks.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10282007-37.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
They can build one anywhere there is enough space if the desire is there. But for companies with multiple data centers they like to spread them out across multiple cities/states/countries to lower the risk factor. The physical location of the data center really doesn't matter so long as they have enough power, big enough data pipes & an educated population from which to hire people. In a virtual world you really don't notice (or care) if the iTunes song you are downloading is coming from the data center down the street or some other country.
Microsoft is building a new super data center in Europe (Ireland?) with one influential factor being the climate, the regional temperatures are lower which means they don't need to spend as much on cooling the building which lowers the environmental cost associated to the building.
They will also factor in risks such as earthquakes, hurricanes, power stability, political stability and so on when looking for a location. California can be a great place but do you really want to drop a major data center over a major fault zone?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10282007-37.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
They can build one anywhere there is enough space if the desire is there. But for companies with multiple data centers they like to spread them out across multiple cities/states/countries to lower the risk factor. The physical location of the data center really doesn't matter so long as they have enough power, big enough data pipes & an educated population from which to hire people. In a virtual world you really don't notice (or care) if the iTunes song you are downloading is coming from the data center down the street or some other country.
Microsoft is building a new super data center in Europe (Ireland?) with one influential factor being the climate, the regional temperatures are lower which means they don't need to spend as much on cooling the building which lowers the environmental cost associated to the building.
They will also factor in risks such as earthquakes, hurricanes, power stability, political stability and so on when looking for a location. California can be a great place but do you really want to drop a major data center over a major fault zone?
Ah yes, I see. You're the type who prefers the low paying Chinese, or Malaysian Tech Jobs?
Wake up. This is your future without a post graduate or preferably a doctoral degree.
Your comment is dumb, the guy was making a valid comment.
46 mil. tax cut for 50 full time jobs is the sickest type of joke in this economy. Obviously apple has pocketed a lot of politicians there and is offering very lucrative bribes on the side.
But if in my state these 46 mil was being invested (in terms of a cut that is) in 50 jobs, with this financial climate I d personaly hire 50 jobless guys off the streats to break the legs of these clowns running things that make a mockery of a nation and a world in crisis...much like the other superstars at AEG who were begging the nation to fund them and save their a only to then award themselves real big bonuses.
Really pathetic stuff....
Uh yes they do.
If they did then they must of used the other half to the iLiver
$1 billion in XServes? Apple should use Dells.
Since Apple.com doesn't run on OSX, I doubt that their farm will.
Uh yes they do.
If they did then they must of used the other half to the iLiver
that was so mean, and so damn funny!!!!
What is this Fox News deep insight data center placement knowledge?
No. The primary reason is because they ALREADY HAVE a huge data center in California. If it was absolutely too expensive wouldn't have gotten the first large one here. This NC facility is the second (or 3rd? data centers weren't as "newsworthy" a while ago so not tracked. Pretty sure this second CA facility is adjunct facility to where they used to have the Cray and all of the other back-end stuff before buying this.) large data center Apple bought in last several years.
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2006/02/27/story5.html
Similarly one of the largest contributors to operating costs for these large centers is power. CA taxes have little to do with power costs in CA. Google , Microsoft , Yahoo, etc. had all been going around the US looking for places where there is cheap, excess (more lots more generation capacity than use) power more so than cheapest real estate. Most of the time that means looking for a nuke oriented uility company/location.
So CA is out just because you do not co-locate large data centers. (especially after having ignored that and have two within 40 miles of each other. ). That the Hayward fault is due for a big one and other factors are almost secondary.
If Apple only had a East Coast data then NC wouldn't have been in the running and CA would be. If going to do world wide coverage from the US need to have two ( one one each coast. )
The property taxes are easier to duck in CA because just don't buy the land and let some Prop 13 land owner lease the dirt sitting on to them. CA already had a huge tax break to match all community breaks... called Prop 13. ( and yeah that is a contributor to the state's current problems. )
They will also factor in risks such as earthquakes, hurricanes, power stability, political stability and so on when looking for a location. California can be a great place but do you really want to drop a major data center over a major fault zone?
Just about every location as some problem if just look deeply. There are no natural/major disaster free locations that have major internet bandwidth.
Granted the Hayward fault is due, but it kicks off a major (6.5+) quake only every 140 years.
There are also spots in the Midwest that are also due for a relatively (given their preparedness ) major quake. Nobody talks about those though. LOL.
CA isn't really a good placement location primarily because every major player is already here. It is a saturated location. Curiously ironic that folks want to spin that it is a undesirable location.
For 25 (being generous with 50% for deeply skilled tech jobs there, likely closer to 15), you just hire that many and move them. Apple's announced minimum education level being looked for is a high school diploma. The insidious socialist plot of free high school education for everyone in the US means that is pragmatically universally true in all possible locations. ( tongue in cheek for the socialist adjectives. )
A major web site is going to have at least 2 if not 3 tiers of servers. One is going to be the public facing tier. That's usually very limited and locked down servers that take requests and funnel the loads machines that really do the work ( unless all doing is serving up static pages. That can be done from read only mounts or mirrored/duplicated content . )
So just because can ping the OS characteristics of the public tier doesn't mean the background tier is the same OS.
It isn't going to be 100% OSX, but a pretty sad statement of the limited value range of Apple's server offerings if they can't significantly leverage them for their own uses in their own data center.
Much of the commerce part of Apple's sites were/are WebObjects based at one point.
There is lots of HVAC, storage, and network gear that will going into the data center too so it won't be all Apple anyway even if the servers were.
But the "public tier" is the only one where an XServe would even begin to make sense. Often you find large numbers of 1U or blade servers at the web tier - you need tons of CPU and limited I/O to do the dynamic web page handling (.PHP, .ASP and other tools that build the web pages on the fly).
Maybe Apple is running OSX on Hackintosh 24 Core 256 GiB HP ProLiant servers in the back end?!
By the way - I don't mean to imply anything bad about Apple using other equipment for their datacentres. Apple is clearly focussed on the end user and small workgroups (with an XServe or two as workgroup servers, or maybe a cluster of XServes as a render farm).
Apple doesn't care about the enterprise, and a data centre with 10's of thousands of servers and perhaps a couple of hundred thousand or more cores is so far out of their "niche" that it would be silly to try to use Apple products. Buy the ProLiants or Superdomes or PowerEdge or x-Series or z-Series or other servers, run Linux or Solaris or AIX or HPUX or even Windows where it makes sense.
Absolutely agree with you... all those 1 in 100 year type events... storms... hurricanes.. tornados... earthquakes, etc etc. It is all about mitigating risk. But then, just by building data centers in many areas around the country/world you are reducing risk assuming there is some form of redundancy as the odds of multiple major events happening in multiple locations at roughly the same time frame is pretty low.
Keeping in mind when it comes to buildings like data centers "roughly the same time could be within a few months or more as catasrophic destruction of one could require months or more to replace.
On a side note, Microsoft and others are working on those container datacenters where you just have lots of containers full of blade servers and once X% of the servers in a specific container fail you just remove that container and replace it with a new one, good for quickly building / replacing / expanding a new or exisiting center.
Purpose for the farm?
iNet(book) in October ish... this in early 10 ish.
I see some streaming power being amassed for the next wave of content management like this service looks to be.
The farm will help push this stuff up thru touches, iphones, and inets (or whatever).
But I honestly don't know what the capabilities are of a 500k sq' of server power can do... can up make them 30 stories tall?
nf
iNet(book) in October ish... this in early 10 ish.
I see some streaming power being amassed for the next wave of content management like this service looks to be.
The farm will help push this stuff up thru touches, iphones, and inets (or whatever).
But I honestly don't know what the capabilities are of a 500k sq' of server power can do... can up make them 30 stories tall?
nf