Of all the places Facebook could build its first company-owned data center, it chose Prineville – a town of about 10,000 in central Oregon that hardly anyone outside of central Oregon itself had heard of. The town was first put on the map for the data center industry by Facebook’s initial announcement of the project in January.

The following month, the general public learned about Prineville after Greenpeace’s public criticism of the company’s choice of power supplier generated controversy in the news.

So why Prineville? Why did the company that has become one of the most powerful symbols of our high-tech era choose a small rural town, surrounded by miles upon miles of ranch land and golf courses, to locate the facility that will soon house some of its core infrastructure?

The area was attractive for Facebook because of relatively cheap power, availability of water and dark fiber, cool climate and a “shovel-ready” site, more than 120 acres in size, said Ken Patchett, the man Facebook hired away from Google to oversee construction and future dayto- day operation of the data center.

The site’s shovel-ready characteristic was a big deal. It was part of an economic development program the state had created to attract big business. The program identifies certain large pieces of undeveloped land and pre-approves them for certain uses, including large industrial facilities. This enables companies that buy the sites to avoid lengthy and expensive environmental-review and other permitting processes developers usually have to undergo.



Average cost of power for industrial customers in the area is about $0.05 per kWh, said Jason Carr, an economic development manager for a non-profit organization called Economic Development for Central Oregon. The large local power supplier that will be selling power to Facebook is Pacific Power, a subsidiary of PacifiCorp, which also serves areas of Oregon and California.

Another benefit for Facebook is Oregon’s relatively friendly taxation code. There is no sales tax in the state, so the only recurring tax burdens are property and income taxes. Since the future data center will only have about 35 employees, income tax will not be much of a concern. “It’s mainly your property taxes on the land and taxes you pay for the building and equipment,” Carr said. The company will be able to avoid much of the remaining tax burden for a while as result of incentives it received from the state. Its construction and equipment costs (including IT gear) will be tax free for 15 years.

The project’s mastermind was Tom Furlong, the company’s director of site operations. Facebook decided to build its own data center to have a solution tailored to its purposes, Patchett said. At the scale the company has reached, it is important to have infrastructure that is built in a way that supports its particular business model. “In other colo spaces, they have to be 33 flavors of vanilla for everybody.”

Facebook is going to keep its sizeable footprint in multiple colocation sites in California and Virginia and there are no plans at this point to halt capacity expansion at those sites. “We’re doing a lot of work in (California) to get as much data there as we can,” Patchett said. “Here (in Prineville) is another site and there’s the other site (in Virginia), so the redundancy that’s available … when this one comes online, will actually really help us an awful lot.”



THE DESIGN
The company has ambitious ‘green’ goals for the facility. “The goal is to be the most efficient steward of the electrons that we consume,” Patchett said. “How can we do that and how many things can we do to actually move to a lower PUE?” Declining to specify the actual target ratio, he said it was expected to be well below the industry-average PUE of 1.8. The team is going for at least a LEED Gold certification.

The facility, brainchild of Facebook’s Data Center Design Architect Jay Park, will be built out in two phases, with about 40,000 square feet of computer floor in each phase. Construction began in January and the data center is expected to come online around first quarter of 2011. Facebook hired DPR/Fortis as the project’s general contractor.

The two-story shell is a structural-steel building with concrete panels on the outside and a concrete-reinforced roof on each of its two decks. Pre-cast wall panels are 5.5 inches thick. Part of the outer shell will have horizontal metal siding. On the ground along the building’s northern wall are two rows of large bolts, which will be used to attach a wall of the future expansion phase if it becomes necessary to build one.

The server rooms will be on the ground level and the mechanical room will be on the second floor, which the builders also refer to as “the penthouse.”

The data center will have an evaporative cooling system that does not use chillers. Outside air will come in through fans that make up the entire western wall of the penthouse, where it will also get filtered. It will be brought to appropriate temperature and humidity levels by a mister system before being delivered from above to the server racks attached to the concrete floor (there will not be a raised floor). The design uses hot-aisle containment.



Return air will come back around to where outside air comes in – through large return openings in the floor long the western wall of the penthouse. Return air will mix with fresh air before being redistributed throughout the facility. Some of the warm return-air will be used for comfort heating of the office space.

“We’re basically using airside economizing, bringing in the atmospheric air and, where necessary, we … hydrate the air to ensure we have an appropriate relative humidity in the data center,” Patchett said.

“Even the act of hydrating air actually cools it, so think of it as a built-in, integral swamp cooler within the data center.”

The data center will use a proprietary nonstandard UPS design (patent pending) with a block-redundant N+1 topology. All electrical work will be done by San Jose, Californiabased Rosendin Electric. Pacific Power will build a switching yard at the site and Facebook will build its own substation.

Most servers Facebook uses are off-the-shelf machines from a variety of manufacturers. The company works with the vendors to make the servers it buys from them more energy efficient. Patchett said Facebook will be using shared compute clusters within the data center, but would not go so far as to call the approach ‘private cloud.’

“I would say that almost every IT company or Internet-facing company today is doing something of that sort. We’re doing a very similar thing (but) I don’t know if it would fit the exact definition of what you call ‘cloud.’”

PROJECT GROWS ON PRINEVILLE
The data center site is on the edge of Prineville, a town in a high-desert flat valley surrounded by tall, mostly snow-covered mountains. Considering the town’s size and remoteness, it comes as no surprise that many of its residents were less than thrilled when they first heard the news that Facebook was moving in.

“There were a lot of people who (felt) threatened by Facebook,” says Bill Gowen, CEO of the Prineville Chamber of Commerce. “It’s huge!” Data centers are largely unheard of in Central Oregon. The only other largescale data center in the entire state is Google’s facility in The Dalles, which Patchett had been running until Facebook snagged him.

Facebook is huge and Prineville is a small rural town that went from asking questions like whether or not their lights would stay on or whether there would be enough water to go around to having hotel billboards and storefront signs that read, “Welcome Facebook.”

The city and county have already benefited from permitting fees the project has generated. There’s also Patchett’s $100,000-per-year community-outreach budget. The construction jobs are temporary, but will nevertheless provide a sizeable boost to the economy. According to Doug Barnhart, the DPR/Fortis project superintendent, out of about 120 people working on the project, about 75 are from Central Oregon.



THE GREENPEACE ISSUE
Flack the project caught from Greenpeace resulted from the environmentalist group’s criticism of PacifiCorp’s generation-fuel portfolio. The company gets 58 percent of its energy from coal and 17 percent comes from gas, according to the company’s Integrated Resource Plan. Hydroelectric energy makes up about nine percent and the rest comes from other sources, including wind and other renewable methods.

Commenting on the criticism, Patchett pointed to resources that are being conserved as a result of people using Facebook, such as avoiding driving to the store to process photos. He also sees the addition of such a large power user to Pacific Power’s client roster as a stimulus for developing more renewable sources.

As an “anchor tenant” in the area, the data center will put it on the map and potentially attract other businesses there, he said. The more businesses move in, the higher the pressure will be on Pacific Power to look for more clean electricity because of the state’s energy regulations. In 2007, Oregon state government enacted a law that requires the largest utilities to get 25 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2025.

A CLOSET COWBOY
Facebook is in the ‘storming’ stage of development, which is a first for Patchett. “The thing about running an operational environment is process and procedure,” he says, adding that he enjoys working for a company in a more normalized state.

“But, in my deepest dark closet, I’m a cowboy. I love just ‘git’er done.’ What do you want me to do? Let’s go.”

From the looks of it, his inner cowboy is having a blast.

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Keywords: Titan, facebook, data center, power, Prineville, computer, UPS design, Greenpeace, hydroelectric energy, anchor tenant