Some of the servers inside Apple's data center in North Carolina. The company is rumored to be considering another large data center in Oregon.

Apple is considering whether to build a new data center adjacent to the Facebook facility in Prineville, Oregon, according to local media. The Oregonian says Apple is the mystery company using the codename “Maverick” that has been evaluating Prineville as a location for a major data center.

The biggest challenge: procuring enough electrical power to support the data center, which could require as much as 31 megawatts of critical load. That capacity would not be available until mid-2013, when a nearby substation could be upgraded to provide additional power.

Apple currently operates a large data center in Maiden, North Carolina. The 500,000 square foot iDataCenter is providing suport for Apple’s new iCloud service, which stores and synchronizes music, photos and data across multiple devices.

Backup Site Needed

As we’ve noted several times previously, it’s likely that Apple will need at least one other large data center complex to provide backup capabilities for the facility in North Carolina. Most major Internet companies have major hubs on both coasts, which helps with content delivery and also provides the ability to keep copies of critical data “out of region” so that a single natural disaster wouldn’t threaten the survival of the data.

There have been rumors for months that major players were scouting sites in Prineville. Facebook’s facility had attracted interest from other companies seeking to leverage the town’s ideal environment for using fresh air to cool servers.  “It’s an ideal location for evaporative cooling,” said Jay Park, Facebook’s Director of Datacenter Engineering.  The temperature in Prineville has not exceeded 105 degrees in the last 50 years, he noted.

The central Oregon climate allows data centers to take advantage of  “free cooling,” the practice of using cool outside temperatures to support the cooling systems. This approach allows data centers to use outside air to either cool water or provide direct air cooling for servers. Either approach allows companies to reduce their use of refrigeration systems, which use a large amount of energy.

The Data Center Clustering Effect

Oregon is benefitting from an effect known as example of data center clustering, in which a regional market becomes an aggregation point for many mission-critical facilities. This trend has usually been focused on major Internet markets (northern Virginia, Silicon Valley) but is now providing opportunities for rural markets like Quincy, Washington and western North Carolina amid shifting criteria for data center site location.

Prineville is one of several hot spots for potential data center development in the state. The Portland suburb of Hillsboro has recently landed new projects for Fortune Data Centers and NetApp, while the Port of Morrow/Umatilla area is home to a new data center for Amazon and is reported to be under consideration for a second facility to house servers for Rackspace.

More data centers would be a boost to the economy in Prineville. The Facebook construction project had an average of 243 workers per day on the site, which required about 228 “man years” of labor to complete.  A total of 88 subcontractors worked on the site, including 41 companies from the immediate area of Bend, Prineville and Redmond. Facebook has hired 35 full-time employees to staff the facility, who earn at least 150 percent of the median salary in the region.

The Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina as seen in satellite imagery on Google Maps.

Apple is in the early stages of installing an array of solar panels on a large parcel of land it is clearing for its new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, according to documents filed with officials in Catawba County. The company is in the process of clearing trees from 171 acres of land across from its 500,000 square foot iDataCenter.

While a solar power generation facility could make Apple’s data center slightly greener, local residents are complaining about smoke in the area from fires to burn off cleared trees and debris on the Apple property, according to local media.

Few details are available about Apple’s plans for a solar array, which were referenced in an application for a soil erosion permit with the county. Apple  has yet to submit plans with Maiden for additional work at the site.

More Data Centers Using Solar Power

If it goes forward with the solar panels, Apple will join a growing number of data center operators building on-site solar arrays to supplement their use of utility power. Most of these companies have used solar energy to support officer areas rather than data halls.

Solar power hasn’t been widely used in data centers because it takes a very large installation of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to produce even a fraction of the energy required by most data centers. It takes about seven acres of photovoltaic panels to generate 1 megawatt of electricity. By that math, if Apple packed the entire 170 acre parcel with solar panels – an unlikely approach – it could generate up to 24 megawatts of power. Estimates of the power capacity for the Apple data center range from 40 megawatts up to 100 megawatts.

The largest current project to incorporate solar energy into a data center is at The McGraw-Hill Companies, which is building a 50-acre solar array in East Windsor, New Jersey that will yield 14 megawatts of solar generation.

Solar as Symbol of Sustainability

While the economics of solar power remain a challenge for large users, the recent flurry of on-site solar arrays suggest that data center operators are recognizing the value of these arrays as a symbol of the industry’s commitment to sustainability. This year we have seen solar installations at new data centers for Cisco Systems (Allen, Texas), and both Facebook and BendBroadband in Oregon.

The environmental group Greenpeace has identified Apple as the leading offender in using energy from “dirty” sources to power its data centers, including coal and nuclear power. The group’s finding relies almost entirely on the impact of the company’s huge new data center in Maiden. Duke Energy, the local utility, currently sources 52 percent of its energy in the Carolinas from nuclear power, 37 percent from fossil fuels, and 7 percent from forms of hydro-electric power.

When it comes to clean air, Apple is drawing fire from neighbors, who tell the Hickory Daily Record that fires burning on the Apple property have shrouded their neighborhood in a cloud of smoke. “The told us they would have a fire, and only do it when the wind’s blowing away,” Maiden resident Zelda Vosburgh told the paper. “They do it 24 hours a day. The house inside smells like smoke. I don’t know if it’s hurting us, breathing it 24 hours a day. Between the smell and the smoke, it’s bad.”

Companies are allowed to burn wood when they clear land, as long as the fire is not blowing toward the road or occupied housing when the fire begins, according to state officials.

For more examples of on-site solar arrays, see Solar-Powered Data Centers, part of our special report, Data Centers & Renewable Energy.

Industry executive Scott Noteboom has left Yahoo for a position at Apple.

Scott Noteboom, who in recent years has led the data center team at Yahoo, has taken a position at Apple. Noteboom now lists Apple as his employer on his LinkedIn profile, but it’s not entirely clear what his role will be. Noteboom’s move was first reported by GigaOm.

Noteboom has overseen a major data center expansion at Yahoo, which has adopted an innovative “chicken coop” design that has improved the energy efficiency of the company’s infrastructure, slashing its power bills in the process. Yahoo has built new “coops” in Lockport, N.Y.; Quincy, Washington; and Avenches, Switzerland. The company has also just rolled out a new data center in Singapore.

Apple Data Centers Supporting iCloud

Apple’s data center infrastructure has been the focus of major speculation since the company began building a huge data center in Maiden, North Carolina to power its iCloud offering, which went live earlier this month. Apple’s iDataCenter team was initially led by eBay veteran Olivier Sanche, who tragically passed away in 2010. Shortly afterward, Microsoft data center chief Kevin Timmons was reportedly headed to Apple (although not as Sanche’s replacement), but last week began a new post as CTO of colocation provider CyrusOne.

It’s not clear what happens now at Yahoo. The company is in the midst of assessing its options after the sudden firing of CEO Carol Bartz last month. Several private equity firms are said to be weighing takeover bids for Yahoo, perhaps partnering with either Microsoft or Google.

Earlier this year Yahoo announced plans to invest at least $500 million in further expanding its data center network. The company was also preparing a new data center design for a series of next-generation facilities it plans to build in 2012 and beyond. The fate of these initiatives appears to be tied to whether the company remains independent or is acquired.

Today the technology world is remembering Apple founder Steve Jobs, who passed away last night at 56. His genius and passion can be seen all around us in products and entertainment we enjoy. Some of the notable personal remembrances of Jobs were shared by Walt Mossberg, Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak. Worthwhile appreciations can be read at The New York Times and Wired. On YouTube, many are turning to Apple ads, incuding a version of the Think Different commercial narrated by Jobs and the “1984″ Super Bowl.

Perhaps the most shared link is Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford, which includes his personal reflections on life, death, success and overcoming adversity. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose,” Jobs said. “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heat. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

One of the things that made Steve Jobs unique was his ability to inspire others to accomplish something insanely great. That’s why there was such incredible anticipation and curiosity about Apple’s new data center in North Carolina. One of the public’s last images of Jobs came at the close of Apple’s developer conference in June, as he introduced the “iDataCenter” (photo above) and his vision for the cloud. “Some people think the cloud is just a big disk in the sky,” said Jobs as he discussed the iCloud. “We think it’s way more than that. We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” What might an insanely great data center and cloud look like? We’ll see in months and years to come, as Jobs’ legacy lives on in the work of the Apple team and technology lovers everywhere.

“I drove over, took some pictures, and talked to folks at the convenience store down the road,” Cringley writes. “My conclusions from this unscientific research is that the giant Apple facility is mainly empty. It’s a huge building filled more or less with nothing and why Apple built it that way frankly escapes me … I think it’s a joke. The building is a near-empty facility built primarily to intimidate Apple competitors. And so far it seems to be working.”

Wow. Did a well-known tech columnist just allege that Apple built an enormous fake data center? And, in essence, accuse Steve Jobs of modeling data center vaporware when he showed off pictures of server rooms filled with gear at the recent WWDC?

There are fair questions about why Apple has built at such enormous scale. But Cringley succumbs to a temptation that often strikes tech journalists: the urge to extrapolate a single data point into a broad conclusion about a data center. This usually involves either how many servers a facility can hold, or how much energy it uses. This process rarely turns out well, and Cringley’s effort is no exception.

Cringley’s estimate that the Apple facility could hold 7.2 million servers is based on the notion that Apple has 1 million square feet of space that can house racks of servers. The problem: The Apple data center is 500,000 square feet, not 1 million (a fact that has been widely reported). The equipment area – the only space that can actually hold racks – makes up just 184,000 square feet of that space, according to planning documents (See our Apple Data Center FAQ for more details).

Cringley also underestimates the amount of square feet required per rack, as noted by commenters from the industry. As a result, he wildly overshoots on his estimates of the number of servers and storage units Apple could house in the building. His conclusion that the building is empty is apparently based on seeing only one truck enter the facility over the course of an hour.

To be fair, Cringlely has a history of much better work on the data center sector, particularly his early scoop on Google’s use of shipping containers to house servers.

Has Apple overbuilt? That’s a better question. It has committed to spend $1 billion in North Carolina, but has nine years to do it – meaning the real answers to the questions about Apple’s data center will be answered over time.

On June 7 the Infinite Apple blog published screen shots of iCloud HTTP traffic analysis that indicate the use of the Windows Azure OS and images being called from Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service. “We presume that iCloud isn’t entirely based on these other cloud services; it would be much more reasonable to deduce from these images that the other services are being used as some sort of CDN to take the load off of Apple,” wrote Parth Dhebar from Infinite Apple.

On June 10, GigaOm mentioned the Infinite Apple report, but cast doubt about its conclusions. “We ran the screenshots by three networking and cloud experts at major companies,” the story noted. “All three said that the screenshots did not conclusively show how iCloud was utilizing the Amazon and Microsoft technologies, if at all. Two sources said that the log could simply show that the image sent over iMessage was itself initially hosted on Azure or Amazon. A third source said Apple may be using Azure and AWS for content delivery network (CDN) purposes.”

Infinite Apple responded on June 13 with additional testing, which it claims provides confirmation that iCloud is using the Azure BLOB (Binary Large Object) storage service. “The resulting traffic showed, quite clearly, the use of Azure services for hosting purposes,” the story notes. “We don’t believe iCloud stores actual content. Rather, it simply manages links to uploaded content.”

This week the story was picked up by prominent Microsoft-watcher Mary Jo Foley, who sought answers from the companies. “I asked Microsoft for comment and was told the company does not share the names of its customers,” Mary Jo writes. “I asked Apple for comment and heard nothing back.”

What’s the significance? The leading theory is that Apple may be tapping the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network, which stores copies of user content on its network of 24 caching nodes around the globe.

If true, that would raise another question: what’s up with Apple’s relationship with its CDN vendors, which are led by Akamai Technologies (AKAM)? Dan Rayburn, who tracks the content delivery industry, recently offered his thoughts on what the iCloud might mean for Akamai. His conclusion: The iTunes component of iCloud is unlikely to be a huge business driver. “The bottom line is that the delivery of audio content from iCloud is not worth that much to Akamai or any other CDN,” Dan writes. “The other services around iCloud could be worth more and if iCloud ends up supporting video content down the road, then the value of the delivery business would be much higher.”

An image from a presentation today by Apple CEO Steve Jobs showing servers inside the new iDataCenter in North Carolina. (Source: Apple)

Apple today offered a glimpse of its new data center as it announced its much-anticipated iCloud cloud computing service, which will allow iTunes users to store music, photos and documents in Apple’s data centers. The free iCloud service will launch this fall, and will synch digital content across all users devices, including iPhones, iPads, Macs and PCs.

Apple is offering each iCloud user 5 gigabytes of storage for email and documents, plus additional storage space for photos and music. That potentially enormous storage offer explains the size of Apple’s new data center in North Carolina, which at 500,000 square feet is among the largest data centers in the country.

“We’re Serious About This”
Apple CEO Steve Jobs described iCloud as a game-changer for consumer cloud computing, featuring free software developed to solve the challenges of storing and managing digital content in a world of proliferating devices.

“We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who unveiled the iCloud at Apple’s developer conference in San Francisco. “Some people think the cloud is just a big disk in the sky. We think it’s way more than that.

“If you don’t think we’re serious about this, you’re wrong,” Jobs continued, as he displayed several images of the massive North Carolina iDataCenter, including the first images of the inside of the facility. The photos revealed some aspects of Apple’s data center design, which features a slab floor and a cooling system in which cold air enters the equipment area from overhead. Apple is using containment systems to separate the cold supply air for the servers from the exhaust heat, a strategy which dramatically improves the efficiency of data center cooling systems.

Apple appears to be enclosing the cold aisle in most configurations, although one of the images suggests Apple is also using hot-aisle containment for some of its equipment.

One image displayed by Jobs showed large data warehousing devices from Teradata, which in its recent versions leverage solid state disks to accelerate data transfer. In an analysis of the images, Stephen Foskett wrote that Apple also appears to be using HP ProLiant servers and several types of storage equipment from NetApp.

Apple said its is “ready to ramp iCloud in its three data centers.” Apple also has existing data centers in Newark, Calif. and on its Cupertino headquarters campus. In April, Apple signed a seven-year lease for 2.28 megawatts of critical power load in a new data center being built in Santa Clara, Calif. by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), a leading developer of wholesale data center space. The Santa Clara facility would provide Apple with additional capacity on the West Coast.

The facility is ” as eco-friendly as you can make a modern data center,” said Jobs, suggesting Apple is mindful of recent criticism from Greenpeace. The environmental group recently gave Apple the lowest rating in an evaluation of the energy use of major data center operators, saying its location in Maiden, North Carolina featured some of the “dirtiest generation mixes in the U.S” with its combination of coal and nuclear power.

Apple said it has already invested more than $500 million in the iDataCenter, about halfway toward its commiment to North Carolina officials that the company would invest at least $1 billion over nine years. “It’s a large place and it’s full of  expensive stuff,” said jobs. “We’re pretty proud of it.”

Here’s another look at the inside of the Apple data center:

An image from a presentation by Apple CEO Steve Jobs showing storage units inside the new Apple data center in North Carolina (Source: Apple)

The Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina as seen in satellite imagery on Google Maps.

When it comes to secrecy and speculation, the combination of Apple and data centers is fertile territory indeed. The blogosphere was awash in conspiracy theories Wednesday after the new Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina “suddenly” showed up on satellite imagery from Google Maps and Google Earth. For many months, the satellite view had shown undisturbed forest where data center construction should be.

What gives? Why does the iDataCenter suddenly appear, just a day after Apple confirms the existence of its iCloud cloud computing service?  “How was Apple able to keep Google from displaying this particular swath of satellite imagery – imagery provided by the USDA Farm Services Agency?” wondered Fortune. “That’s still a mystery.”

It’s tantalizing to envision clandestine meetings in which Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt negotiated the date when the iDataCenter could first be seen from space. The truth appears to be less sensational.

As it turns out, Google just did a large update of its satellite imagery, which it announced on the Google Lat Long Blog. “We regularly update our imagery in Google Earth in order to provide our users with the richest, most up-to-date imagery possible,” a Google spokeswoman told NBC. “In this case, we updated our aerial imagery recently in Lenoir, N.C., which we announced on May 20, 2011.”

Are Some Facilities “Stealthed”?
That doesn’t mean that Google has never selectively updated its satellite imagery based on the location of data centers. A case in point: Google’s data centers in The Dalles, Oregon are clearly visible on rival mapping sites from Microsoft and Yahoo, but nowhere to be found on Google Maps, which appears to be using imagery of The Dalles from before the data centers were built in 2006.

This is a little odd, given that the facility is one of the data center industry’s most photographed facilities. Pictures of the data center buildings at The Dalles have appeared on the front page of The New York Times, Information Week and in many photos on Flickr. A copy of Google’s site plan was published by Harpers.

But this treatment doesn’t seem to reflect a policy decision by Google to obscure its major data centers on Google Maps. Other Google facilities can be clearly seen in the satellite view.

If you’re a fan of this kind of thing, you’ll definitely want to check out the feature “Data Centers From the Sky” over at Data Center Map.

An aerial view of the new Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina, excerpted by a new video by Bill Wagenseller.

Apple today confirmed that it will announce details for “iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering,” at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference next Monday. The announcement confirms the long-held assumption here at data Center Knowledge that th size of Apple’s new data center in North Carolina was a sure sign of a coming cloud offering. It also confirms that Apple has acquired the iCloud.com domain name for the service.

Apple offered no additional details on the iCloud service. It’s long been known that the new data center in North Carolina would support iTunes and MobileMe. The suspense has been whether those services would undergo a cloud transformation that would explain the enormous scale of the 500,000 square foot iDataCenter in North Carolina.

In recent weeks, Apple has added additional data center space in Silicon Valley to support a broadly-deployed. Most major Internet companies have major hubs on both coasts, which helps with content delivery and also provides the ability to keep copies of critical data “out of region” so that a single natural disaster wouldn’t threaten the survival of the data.

Want to know more about Apple’s data centers? See the Apple Data Center FAQ or check out some of our previous coverage:

• Where Apple’s ‘Secret Cloud’ Will Live
• Is an iTunes “Reboot” Driving the iDataCenter Project?
• The iDataCenter and the Cloud
• Maiden iDataCenter Will be 500,000 Square Feet
• The Apple-Google Data Center Corridor