Facebook 'friends' Prineville

The largest social networking site in the world picked Prineville to be the site of its first-ever data center, to be completed by 2011. What does it mean for the community? Well for starters, 200-plus construction jobs.

Kevin Gaboury

Even if you're not a fan of social networking, you have to be a little excited about the big news announced Thursday in Crook County.

Ever since the mysterious "Project Vitesse" declared that Prineville was on its short list of potential locations for a data center last year, rumors have swirled about the company's true identity. "Is it Google? Is it Yahoo?"

Well, actually neither.

Next year, Prineville will become the home of the first data center built by social networking giant Facebook. The news was officially announced at a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday at the data center's future location, just off Tom McCall Road near the Prineville Airport.

"It's been a long road to get to this point," said Tom Furlong, Facebook's site selector in charge of the project. "I have to say, at Facebook, we are extremely excited to be here. This is a very big step for our company. We are very excited to be able to put (this data center) in Prineville."

A big step because it will be the first of such data centers constructed by Facebook. The company, founded in 2004 by a group of Harvard students, has since grown to its current mark of approximately 350 million users. Data centers are needed to be able to keep up with this massive and constantly growing network of users around the world.

In fact, when asked who has a Facebook account during Thursday's ceremony, more than three-quarters of the audience's hands shot up.

The $200 million, 147,000 square-foot facility will house thousands of computer servers that are networked together and linked by fiber-optic cable to computers around the world. When a user performs an action on Facebook, such as updating their "status" or uploading photos, the information is received and computed almost instantaneously by the servers before appearing on your computer screen.

Prineville Mayor Mike Wendel praised Facebook for its innovation and mentioned he recently set up his own page. "Does this make me user number 350 million and one?" he joked.

"Everyone felt this was a perfect fit for our community," Wendel added.

Facebook already purchased the 124 acres of land for $3.2 million this month, but the data center itself will only occupy around 30 of them. Construction has already begun and will continue until the facility's scheduled opening in mid-2011.

In a county where timber and manufacturing have been the main economic drivers for decades, leaders touched on the importance of diversification if Crook County is going to weather the economic storm.

"We needed this," said Crook County Judge Mike McCabe. "This is a day of new beginnings. The community has taken some tough blows in the last few months, but we have been resilient . . . That resilience has paid off."

In a county where unemployment has hovered around 18 percent for the past six months - consistently the highest in the state - the data center is a godsend. For the struggling construction industry, Facebook estimates 200 workers will be needed to build the facility. The company has also committed to hire as many workers as possible from the local workforce and purchase materials locally whenever possible. Once the 12-month construction period is complete, the facility will hire a full-time staff of approximately 35, who will earn 150 percent of the local prevailing wage. Facebook will begin recruiting for these positions in the third quarter of 2010. These employees will repair and maintain servers, generators, back-up power supplies and other critical components at the facility.

"Our community is really excited about these new jobs and this construction project," said Oregon Senator Doug Whitsett. "We really need the jobs and we welcome you here to bring those jobs. Ongoing government policy has decimated the farming and timber harvest industries. We need to diversify if we're going to survive as rural towns."

For its part, Facebook is getting a pretty sweet deal as well. Through a long-term enterprise zone (LTEZ) agreement with the City of Prineville and Crook County, Facebook will be exempt from paying property taxes for 15 years - as long as it maintains an average staff of 35 or more. For the size of the facility, this totals approximately $2.8 million in taxes per year.

In return for the lost tax revenue, Facebook has agreed to pay the city and county an annual "community fee" of $110,000. In addition, the company will pay system development charges (SDCs) for water and sewer hookups and transportation charges for impacts to county roads. Due to the data center's hefty power usage, Pacific Power will also pay an annual franchise fee to the city for the infrastructure usage.

"This gives me a renewed sense of hope and excitement in this community," said Prineville-Crook County Economic Development Director Jason Carr. "This county has dealt with unemployment rates that we haven't seen since the early 1980s, and much of that has been directly related to the downturn in the construction industry. To see signs of life again is a welcome sight for the community."

According to Furlong, the data center will be one of the most energy-efficient of its kind in the world. Energy use in data centers is measured in terms of power usage effectiveness (PUE), which is determined by dividing the amount of power entering the center by the power used to run its servers. The average PUE of a typical data center is 1.8, meaning that for every 1.8 watts that go through the meter, 1 watt is delivered to the computer infrastructure.

The Prineville data center's PUE will be around 1.15, thanks to an evaporative cooling system, which uses the evaporation of water to achieve cooling. It will also employ an airside economizer, which brings in colder air from the outside to cool the servers during the winter months. Furlong says the amount of water used by the facility on a daily basis will depend on the climate.

"With the design we're using, the water usage is actually less than a traditional design and it is variable based on what the weather is," he said. "We're going to be using well water on the site as well so we don't burden the city's resources."

As for power usage, Furlong says it is dependent upon how much hardware is in place, and ramps up as more servers are installed. For proprietary reasons, Facebook is not able to disclose the number and types of servers or how much power each will use, on average.

The data center is not only Facebook's first, it's also the first facility of its kind to be built in Central Oregon and the first major investment by Facebook in Oregon. This begs the question: Why Prineville?

Along with the obvious tax incentives, Furlong mentioned Prineville's relatively dry climate is ideal for operating a large-scale data center.

"The environment is great for operating a data center here - it's very efficient," Furlong said. "It's a wonderful business climate. Working with the city and county, we've been able to get all the services that we need to support the facility, and working with Pacific Power, they've been able to give us the amount of power (we need) at a price that is competitive. The business opportunities that the state has established have pointed us in the direction of Prineville, so it all kind of comes together."

For more information on the project, visit www.facebook.com/prinevilledatacenter