Apple iDataCenter Set for Maiden, NC

It looks like Apple has finalized the site for its $1 billion iDataCenter in North Carolina. Apple and state officials aren’t commenting about the location, but representatives of the Catawba County town of Maiden have already scheduled a press conference for next Monday to announce the deal.

On June 3 Apple confirmed that it will invest more than $1 billion over nine years in a data center campus somewhere in North Carolina, but did not announce the site. The facility will provide Apple with a major East Coast infrastructure hub to support its iTune music store and iPhone app store., and is expected to employ at least 50 full-time employees.

The project will bring at least 50 high-paying jobs to Catawba County, where the unemployment rate was 15.5 percent in May, up from 15 percent in April.

Reports about Apple’s site location process have focused on properties just off Route 321 in Maiden, where the Catawba County Economic Development Corp. has been marketing several properties for data center use. Apple has said it is in the process of acquiring a site. But there are strong indications that the choice has been made, and the facility will indeed be built in Maiden.

On Monday, July 6 members of the Maiden Town Council will join representatives of the Catawba County Board of Commissioners and the county’s Economic Development Corp. to make an announcement at the Maiden Recreation Center. Maiden mayor Marcus Midgett told local media that the announcement will “probably involve a new industry coming to Maiden.”

Growing in Raleigh: Hosted Solutions, rmSource

It’s been a good week for Research Triangle in North Carolina, which has seen the announcement of two new data center projects:

• Hosted Solutions said Monday that it company has completed a $12 million expansion of its SAS-70 Type II Raleigh data center. The expansion includes an additional 8,000 square feet of raised-floor space in the data center and the completion of a state-of-the-art network operations center (NOC). “Our customers are increasingly outsourcing their entire operational IT infrastructures to us,” said Rich Lee, Hosted Solutions’ Founder and Chief Executive Officer.
• Managed services provider rmsourceannounced a new data center and expansion of its private cloud computing and software-as-a-service solutions. The data center will open in the fourth quarter of 2009 in a stand-alone facility in Durham, North Carolina. Services at the new facility will include rmsource private clouds, Software-as-a-Service, Voice-over-IP/ unified messaging, disaster recovery site hosting, and managed application servers.

It’s Official: Apple iDataCenter to North Carolina

Apple Inc. (AAPL) has selected North Carolina as the location for a new data center and will invest more than $1 billion in the project over nine years, Gov. Bev Perdue announced today. The announcement, which capped weeks of rumors about the huge project, cam after Perdue signed an incentive package that will provide significant tax breaks for Apple.

“North Carolina continues to be a prime location for growing and expanding global technology companies,” said Perdue. “We welcome Apple to North Carolina and look forward to working with the company as it begins providing a significant economic boost to local communities and the state.”

The facility will provide Apple with a major East Coast infrastructure hub to support its iTune music store and iPhone app store. The project is expected to employ at least 50 full-time employees.

Apple Deal ‘All But Done’ for Catawba, NC

A deal for Apple to build a major data center at a site in Catawba County, North Carolina is “all but done” and may be sealed when the state Senate finalizes an incentive package that could add up to $3 million in anual tax breaks for the company, according to local media reports.

Apple has been considering two sites in North Carolina for a potential $1 billion data center project that will provide it with a major East Coast infrastructure hub to support its iTune music store and iPhone app store. Backers of a site in Cleveland County have been told by state officials that it is “all but a done deal” that Apple will choose a rival site in Catawba County. The prospective Apple location in Catawba appears to be one of several locations county officials have been touting for data center projects.

On Thursday the North Carolina Senate gave preliminary approval to the incentive package for Apple, with a final vote scheuled for this evening. Gov. Beverly Perdue is expected to sign the bill if it passes.

Catawba County officials have been targeting data centers for development, and have been actively marketing several sites off Route 321 for their fiber and power infrastructure. “We have anticipated the needs of the data center industry and are working daily to make Catawba County one of the best place in the country to locate data centers and server farms,” Scott Millar, president of the Catawba County Economic Development Corporation, said on the agency’s web site.

Apple Planning $1 Billion iDataCenter

An aerial view of the Apple data center in Newark, Calif. The company is said to be planning to add a major East Coast data center (Source: Google Maps).

Apple is planning a major East Coast data center to boost the capacity of its online operations, and may invest as much as $1 billion in building and operating the huge server farm. The company is considering locations in North Carolina, where officials are rushing to pass enhanced tax breaks to woo Apple to their state rather than neighboring Virginia, which just passed its own incentives for data center projects.

The North Carolina House is expected to vote today on a package that would offer income tax breaks to companies that invest more than $1 billion over nine years in a rural area of the state and pay above-average salaries, according to local media.  

The size of the project raises interesting questions about Apple’s ambitions for its online operations. The $1 billion price tag is nearly twice the $500 to $600 million that Microsoft and Google typically invest in the enormous data centers that power their cloud computing platforms. 

Apple requires sturdy web infrastructure to power its iTunes store and the iPhone app store. Apple customers have downloaded more than than 6 billion songs from the iTunes store, and more than 1 billion iPhone apps from the app store. 

But the budget for the East Coast facility suggests a much larger facility than the 109,000 square foot Newark, Calif. data center Apple bought in 2006 to support its growing infrastructure. Apple also operates a data center on its Cupertino, Calif. campus, and has used content delivery networks from Akamai (AKAM) and Limelight Networks (LLNW) to distribute content to its users around the globe.  

DataChambers Building Second Data Center

North Carolina service provider DataChambers today announced plans to build a second data center on its Winston-Salem campus, while expanding its existing data center for the second time in less than a year. DataChambers will invest $9 million in the expansion, which will more than double the company’s data center capacity. The company currently has more than 110 clients from 28 states, who use its 44,000 square foot facility to house both backup systems and primary data networks.  

“We’re responding to a strong growth in our business, fueled by companies trying to do more with limited budgets,” said Nicholas Kottyan, CEO of DataChambers. “Typically our clients find we can deliver a level of service they simply are unable to replicate affordably on their own.”

NetApp Ditches Lease, Buys Data Centers

In recent months there’s been much discussion of the merit of sale/leaseback agreements, in which providers who own their data center sell the building to a third party and then lease space and remain as a tenant. Sale/leaseback transactions generate cash for the former owner (now the tenant), and provides the new owner steady rent from the lease. A number of data center companies are focusing on sale/leaseback opportunities, including CRG West and T5 Partners.

Against that backdrop, here’s an example of a company going the other direction: NetApp (NTAP) has paid $119 million to buy two data centers it was leasing from BNP Paribas Lending Group. Back in 2007, NetApp signed an agreement in which it leased property in North Carolina and California to BNP, which then provided funding for NetApp to build data centers at the sites. NetApp has instead terminated the leases in Research Triangle Park and Sunnyvale, Calif., paid the outstanding balances on the lease deal, and regained title to the two facilities.

N.C. Colleges Team Up On New Data Center

The huge expense of building a new data center is prompting some innovative approaches to new construction. Yesterday two North Carolina universities announced that plans to jointly develop a $46 million data center near Greensboro. North Carolina A&T and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro say that sharing the data center will save the state more than $60 million while beefing up the computing infrastructure at both schools.

“In the long run, I think it will set a good example for the other universities in the system,” said N.C. A&T chancellor Stanley Battle. The two schools already collaborate on Gateway University Research Park, the business campus where the new facility will be located. The data center will also provide additional connectivity that will attract private companies to the business park, according to UNCG Chancellor Patricia Sullivan, who noted the “insatiable demand” for computing power.