Facebook makes new connection with Meath

The next time you post a status update to Facebook or upload a picture to Instagram, think about where that data may end up. Before it reaches news feeds of friends and family, it will pass through one of Facebook's giant data centres, hubs where thousands of servers process the billions of photos, status updates, videos and messages that are sent on Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram every day.

On the edge of the Arctic Circle in north Sweden sits the town of Luleå, home to one such data centre.

The town hit its first boom in the mid-19th century, when the construction of the railway kickstarted the transport of iron ore from the Bothian coast to Norway. That gave rise to a booming steel industry for the town, and a robust power network.

These days though, attention has turned to more high-tech pursuits. Luleå has become a research hub, with its own start-up incubation centre, and more importantly, it’s the site of Facebook’s first data centre outside the US. The centre is in an area that has become known as the Node Pole, where 10 data centres spread out over four municipalities, and even has its own alliance aiming to increase that number.

Before the high-tech influx, Luleå, like most towns in the northern part of Sweden, was losing its young people to the cities.

But in recent years the town’s population has grown instead of shrunk. There are new hotels and restaurants springing up, and although Facebook doesn’t claim credit for the entire boom, it’s clear that it has played a part.

“The town is buzzing compared to where it was three years ago. Last year it had the highest level of growth of any town in Sweden,” says Niall McEntegart, Facebook’s head of data centre operations for the EMEA and APAC regions. He joined the company in 2012, overseeing the construction of the centre at Luleå.

From the outside, it doesn’t look like much. The grey building is surrounded by a fence that aims to keep out the moose rather than any prying eyes. But inside, it houses thousands of servers, one of five data centres that Facebook uses to ensure that is 1.55 billion users don’t find themselves suddenly cut off from their social circle, or lose their data built up over years of use on the site.

The hardware, like in other Facebook data centres, has been created to be an energy efficient as possible, using the Open Compute Project to bring expertise from outside Facebook into the design process.

The explosion in data is one of the reasons behind the increase in Facebook’s data centre capacity. The amount of data shared through its networks has increased dramatically in recent years as the growth in smartphones and the popularity of social media has increased, and it’s set to keep rising as people to continue to use the platform to share video and images – more than 8 billion videos are viewed each day on Facebook.

At Luleå, there are currently about 150 people employed directly by the data centre – technicians and other support staff that keep it running, and about two-thirds are local – but the wider economic benefit is much greater, according to the town’s mayor, Niklas Nordstrom.

“When you have a company like Facebook put a flag in the ground in a small town in the north of Sweden, it means a lot of recognition.

“We have a collaboration partnership with Austin in Texas and one of the reasons why they, as a much larger city than we are, said that we should be partners is because of the Facebook investment. They were very clear on that.”

From the time of its construction, which began four years ago, and up to 2020, the project will have created about 2,500 jobs. The town also invested heavily in fibre infrastructure some ago, a move it saw as necessary due to its remote location, and one that has paid off.

Meanwhile, the impact in Luleå extends to more than 4,000 jobs indirectly supported by the centre, from tourism to construction.

Impact

The village of Clonee, where Facebook will locate its second data centre outside of Europe, offers a less dramatic landscape than the Swedish town. But the local authorities are hoping it will have a similar impact on the area.

"We know that because of Facebook making an investment in the area it will impact economic activity in that area and in the county as a whole," said chief executive of Meath County Council Jackie Maguire.

The centre, when finished, will employ between 100 and 200 people, with thousands of jobs expected to be created during the construction phase, expected to last about 10 years in total. Initially a 31,000sq m centre will be built, with planning permission for a second building on the site.

Not everyone was in favour of the data centre when it was announced. The planning application was granted in July, but objections had been raised and the decision was appealed to An Bord Pleanála, with local residents concerned about traffic volumes and heavy goods vehicles during the construction phase of the project.

Concerns

Maguire said the company had done everything possible “to be a good neighbour” and address the community’s concerns.

The project was eventually given the go-ahead in October, and on Monday this week the company officially announced that it would proceed.

Facebook had already departed from its usual procedures for the planning application.

“We don’t disclose who we are normally – that’s the norm for these situations because you don’t want people to suddenly artificially increase prices. From a political POV it needs to be kept quiet because you can have people jump on bandwagons and assume things,” McEntegart said.

“We tend to go into these situations pretty much anonymously, because it’s just better all round – it’s a lot cleaner and less fuss. That would be pretty standard across this industry.”

This time, however, the application was made in the name of Runways Information Services, but Facebook was officially linked to the project.

“It’s a very small industry and country, very quickly people would have started figuring it out anyway so we decided just to be open and transparent about it.”

It’s a natural presumption that the establishment of the Irish data centre is linked in some way to the striking down of Safe Harbour a few months ago. But the centre has been planned long before the Safe Harbour came up for review at the European Court of Justice, and the company is keen to stress that its construction is nothing to do with data protection laws. However, the majority of Facebook’s users are now outside the US.

When it’s operational, the Meath data centre will handle data from Facebook users all over the world, rather than just data from European users. Facebook’s data centres act like redundancy – if one goes down, another can pick up and in theory, users shouldn’t notice any difference.

For McEntegart, the location of the data centre in Co Meath is a particular source of pride. Originally from Co Louth, he still lives in the area, so will have a data centre on his doorstep

The Clonee site was chosen over a number of European rivals, although the company isn’t disclosing exactly where else it was looking. “When you’re picking any data centre site, it’s a pretty long process, a lot of things to look at,” he said.

“It’s excellent from a construction point of view, it’s pretty much shovel-ready, really good power and network infrastructure.”

However, there are other reasons to mark this data centre out as different from the others.

“It will be the only location in Facebook where we will have a data centre 20 minutes away from and infrastructure and engineering operations team that we have in Dublin. Not even at Menlo Park,” he said. “Having these two beside each other will benefit us a lot.

Like the Luleå centre, it will be environmentally friendly, with renewable energy and air cooling used to keep the servers at the correct temperature. The setup in Luleå is impressive, with a power usage efficiency rating of 1.07; the industry average is around 1.9. Cold air is sucked in from outside, filtered and pumped around the massive halls holding the servers, and warm is extracted.

Tweaks

The Irish site will follow a similar plan, with a few tweaks.

“We improve and change depending on small factors, such as the proximity to the sea in Ireland and salt in the air,” explained McEntegart.

That’s not the only thing that will be different. It’s unlikely that there will be much call for snowmobiles in Clonee, nor are any of the staff likely to ski to work. But the Facebook-branded bicycles that you imagine don’t get much use during Luleå’s winter may find a more suitable home in Meath.

Meanwhile the county is seeing the project as an opportunity, targeting further similar investment as part of its economic development plan. It may well be the project that kickstarts an economic movement.