Apple Data Centre Athenry = Middle of Nowhere.

MayoSalmon · 03-03-2015 4:44pm

Carawaystick wrote: »

page 15

Your making my points for me here, like I said only an electricity supplier can enter a CfD for power with a generatior not an Apple or Google etc etc

"Aughinish and Tynagh entered a contract for differences (CfD) agreement with Electric Ireland, whereby EIectric Ireland recovers or returns additional monies paid under the agreement from/to the PSO levy. "

Carawaystick · 04-03-2015 5:06pm

MayoSalmon wrote: »

Your making my points for me here, like I said only an electricity supplier can enter a CfD for power with a generatior not an Apple or Google etc etc

"Aughinish and Tynagh entered a contract for differences (CfD) agreement with Electric Ireland, whereby EIectric Ireland recovers or returns additional monies paid under the agreement from/to the PSO levy. "

And Electric Ireland aren't an individual company?

dubhthach · 04-03-2015 5:59pm

Folks perhaps a seperate thread is required for talking about the in's-and-out's of power generation in Ireland today.

MayoSalmon · 04-03-2015 11:16pm

Carawaystick wrote: »

And Electric Ireland aren't an individual company?

Oh dear

Dr_Bill · 19-06-2015 4:05pm

Well it seems the locals are not too keen and are challenging the planning See here

With the planning issues surrounding the city bypass in Galway I do have to ask myself what do people in Galway actually want?

I would have thought a project to bring local employment and enterprise to The West could only be a good thing? Maybe the DC should be moved to Limerick or Cork instead? maybe Enda will want it in Castlebar if Galway won't have it.

fcio · 19-06-2015 4:23pm

Dr_Bill wrote: »

Well it seems the locals are not too keen and are challenging the planning
With the planning issues surrounding the city bypass in Galway I do have to ask myself what do people in Galway actually want?

I would have thought a project to bring local employment and enterprise to The West could only be a good thing? Maybe the DC should be moved to Limerick or Cork instead? maybe Enda will want it in Castlebar if Galway won't have it.

It is a bit disingenuous painting a small opposition group (there are always NIMBYs) as all "the people of Galway". I am from the area and want this to go ahead and I also supported the Galway bypass and the 2 major motorways to be intersecting in the area.

The same parents of these kids will be moaning in 15 years time when their little darlings have to leave the country to find a job.

Tho' on the other hand lets not fool ourselves, Apple are doing this to "whitehash" the billions they laundered via Ireland onto Carribean, a sort of overglorified Breaking Bad style car wash thought up by Irish versions of Saul Goodman

h**p://i.imgur.com/Hjz3o8O.jpg

But any jobs are better than no jobs no matter the motivation.

dubhthach · 20-06-2015 9:06pm

The objections seem to think the 18 generators will be running 24/7 as oppose to been hot stand-by and only been used in either to cover grid failure or for regular spin up testing. (which wouldn't last that long anyways!)

Also once the equipment is installed, I doubt there's gonna be much in way of traffic to site, it's not like it's a warehouse holding goods for onward shipment ffs.

snowstreams · 10-09-2015 3:17pm

This got the go ahead from Galway county council today.

http://www.galwayindependent.com/news/topics/articles/2015/09/10/4105655-council-grant-permission-for-apples-850m-data-centre-in-athenry/

dubhthach · 10-09-2015 5:43pm

Hardly surprising that, wonder what sorta Commercial rates they can charge against it.

4ensic15 · 16-09-2015 8:03pm

plodder wrote: »

This is great news for Athenry by the way.

I do not think it is good news for Athenry. It will inevitably become obsolete. It will be closed and abandoned within a few decades. Athenry will be left with a derelict early 21st century industrial building. There will only be a handful of jobs for locals, even during the construction phase. A thing like that should be put into an existing industrial estate/complex to ensure that the site will be re-used when, inevitably, it is mothballed.

Markcheese · 16-09-2015 10:25pm

I'd be amazed if it lasts a couple of decades - but what does these days -there won't be a massive amount of direct employment but something like that data center will add an awful lot of small indirect employment to the area - that's a big building to service-
( incidentally I remember a huge factory built near my parents home (way out in the sticks at the time) to make brake pads - didn't last long - the company that has the building now employs over 2500 people in the area-

dubhthach · 17-09-2015 9:05pm

Well one thing I can imagine it doing is attracting other Data Center providers to region. Given the size of proposed Apple DC you can imagine that the powergrid and Fibre connectivity in area is fairly decent at the moment, will only get better.

You have to remember that 95%+ (if not 99%) of large Data centers in Ireland are within 10-15km's of the M50, such a large development in west sets a precedent.

4ensic15 · 18-09-2015 9:39am

dubhthach wrote: »

Well one thing I can imagine it doing is attracting other Data Center providers to region. Given the size of proposed Apple DC you can imagine that the powergrid and Fibre connectivity in area is fairly decent at the moment, will only get better.

You have to remember that 95%+ (if not 99%) of large Data centers in Ireland are within 10-15km's of the M50, such a large development in west sets a precedent.

Data centres are a passing fad. Like the call centres of yesteryear the data centres will be relocated when technology advances. What good will a pile of decrepit industrial buildings be to the region in a few years?
moore's law will do for the data centres what it did to the printers of manuals.

dubhthach · 18-09-2015 9:55am

Nice Hyperbole, but you swear there was never something such as demolition occurring in this country. Of course with a facility like Apple planning been totalling Containerised, there's nothing stopping it been converted into warehousing or any other usage in future (given proximity to 3 motorways, M6 and M17/M18) it would be repurposed very easily.

plodder · 18-09-2015 10:19am

4ensic15 wrote: »

Data centres are a passing fad. Like the call centres of yesteryear the data centres will be relocated when technology advances. What good will a pile of decrepit industrial buildings be to the region in a few years?
moore's law will do for the data centres what it did to the printers of manuals.

Remarkable negativity. In the short to medium term, more and more computing is being pushed into "the cloud" and these data centres are where it is at. As Keynes said, in the long term ... we are all dead.

4ensic15 · 18-09-2015 9:01pm

plodder wrote: »

Remarkable negativity. In the short to medium term, more and more computing is being pushed into "the cloud" and these data centres are where it is at. As Keynes said, in the long term ... we are all dead.

Where it is at NOW! Watch the effect of Moores law.

plodder · 19-09-2015 8:24am

4ensic15 wrote: »

Where it is at NOW! Watch the effect of Moores law.

I've been watching it for the last 30 years. What's your point exactly?

20-09-2015 11:42am

4ensic15 wrote: »

Data centres are a passing fad. Like the call centres of yesteryear the data centres will be relocated when technology advances. What good will a pile of decrepit industrial buildings be to the region in a few years?
moore's law will do for the data centres what it did to the printers of manuals.

How are data centres "a passing fad", are you expecting individuals to store terabytes of data on their home devices just in case they ever need to refer to it or something?

Such a system would require gigabit to the house and would create a massive headache in data synchronisation between the millions of individual datastores.

Far better to have a few dedicated datastores with a managed synchronisation between them.

20-09-2015 11:45am

4ensic15 wrote: »

Where it is at NOW! Watch the effect of Moores law.

Moores law in action but what's your point?
from this

to this

4ensic15 · 20-09-2015 11:57am

If things keep progressing at the rate they have since, the rationale for siting data centres (moderate climate) in Ireland will disappear. An object the size of a brick will hold as much date as the Athenry centre and will be capable of surviving equally well in the desert of the South Pole. That is why all this crowing with joy about the location of a data centre is ridiculuos. Dell came and went. Gateway 2000 came and went. Call centres came and many relocated to India. The list goes on. For a few construction and cleaning jobs Athenry will be left with a derelict heap of concrete in a few years. It will do as much for the town as the tobelerone houses did for the holiday resorts.

20-09-2015 12:01pm

Deleted User wrote: »

How are data centres "a passing fad", are you expecting individuals to store terabytes of data on their home devices just in case they ever need to refer to it or something?

Such a system would require gigabit to the house and would create a massive headache in data synchronisation between the millions of individual datastores.

Far better to have a few dedicated datastores with a managed synchronisation between them.

4ensic15 wrote: »

If things keep progressing at the rate they have since, the rationale for siting data centres (moderate climate) in Ireland will disappear. An object the size of a brick will hold as much date as the Athenry centre and will be capable of surviving equally well in the desert of the South Pole. That is why all this crowing with joy about the location of a data centre is ridiculuos. Dell came and went. Gateway 2000 came and went. Call centres came and many relocated to India. The list goes on. For a few construction and cleaning jobs Athenry will be left with a derelict heap of concrete in a few years. It will do as much for the town as the tobelerone houses did for the holiday resorts.

Maybe you missed my earlier reply so here it is again, distributed datastores require massive high speed data networks and very reliable synchronisation software to function.

StonyIron · 20-09-2015 12:04pm

Their Cork site isn't in the middle of nowhere nor is it badly connected. It's 4km from Patrick Street and connected via the 202 bus which has a 15 min frequency during the day and 30 min off peak.

EMC and VMware run private busses to the city centre, Apple may well do similar.

Apple also has space in the city centre.

The Apple site is no worse (actually a lot better) connected by public transport than most of Cork's outlying technology campuses and industrial parks.

That's more of an indictment of Bus Éireann than local planning too as Cork is actually pretty well organised and laid out compared to most Irish cities. Things are actually in clusters.

Data centres are like the internet's telephone exchanges. They're just a bland building full of racks of servers that needs relatively little on site intervention other than just normal maintenance.

Much of the network maintenance will be done in California or Cork or wherever apple have their network operations centre. It won't be in a data warehouse, that I can assure you!

They're a security risk so having them in a safe, out of the way location is preferable. Apple would probably prefer we all forget this facility exists.

(Telephone exchange location used to literally be a state secret for similar reasons)

They really just need a source of sustainable energy and in Ireland because of the climate they can pretty much passively cool.

The West of Ireland's wet, cool, non extreme weather is actually a huge selling point for data centres.

The knock on effect for the west of Ireland is in small scale job creation but the bigger one is that it will drive demand for fibre connectivity which actually means telcos pay more attention and Galway City and regional towns benefit from that in a big way as they'll see enhanced backhauled connection options.

Also data centres aren't a passing fad. They are if anything going to be growing at exponential rates as faster and ubiquitous mobile broadband and fixed line broadband means more and more powerful services are made available to mobile devices from a central location.

We're rapidly moving away from the PC era and into a centralised computing era again because the communications infrastructure is making it possible and there are things that can be done on huge centralised servers that can't ever be done on a local computer at anything like the same cost or efficiency.

20-09-2015 12:10pm

4ensic15 wrote: »

If things keep progressing at the rate they have since, the rationale for siting data centres (moderate climate) in Ireland will disappear. An object the size of a brick will hold as much date as the Athenry centre and will be capable of surviving equally well in the desert of the South Pole. That is why all this crowing with joy about the location of a data centre is ridiculuos. Dell came and went. Gateway 2000 came and went. Call centres came and many relocated to India. The list goes on. For a few construction and cleaning jobs Athenry will be left with a derelict heap of concrete in a few years. It will do as much for the town as the tobelerone houses did for the holiday resorts.

Manufacturing has being going east for the past couple of decades now, that won't change in the near future. As for call centres, some are returning to Ireland & UK due to there being too many customer complaints. Data centres can go anywhere, but there are preferred locations that have reliable power & a temperate climate and most importantly, reliable staff nearby and a secure location.

StonyIron · 20-09-2015 12:13pm

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Manufacturing has being going east for the past couple of decades now, that won't change in the near future. As for call centres, some are returning to Ireland & UK due to there being too many customer complaints. Data centres can go anywhere, but there are preferred locations that have reliable power & a temperate climate and most importantly, reliable staff nearby and a secure location.

Ping time also is a *huge* deal. You don't want data centres at huge distances from markets. Ireland will predominantly be serving the UK and Northern Europe because we're extreme well connected by diverse fibre routes.

Having your data centres in India wouldn't make a lot of sense, even by fibre connectivity.

Countries like Ireland have a major advantage in being cool, wet, very safe and having a sustainable energy policies and very good international connectivity.

Apple could easily site further centres elsewhere even on their Cork Campus without any fanfare.

These companies keep that infrastructure as low key as they possibly can and its regularly shrouded in secrecy.

Oafley Jones · 20-09-2015 12:18pm

He's also missing the environmental reasons for locating these centres. And let's not forget the exponential growth at which data is being generated. Comparing data centres to manufacturing or a call centres shows a basic lack of understanding on the issue.

StonyIron · 20-09-2015 12:21pm

It won't be a major employer, but it is good for the region due to knock on benefits, especially in terms of fibre connectivity demands.

I agree, the change in technology is unlikely to make data centres unnecessary, smaller more powerful servers and smaller more compact memory just means even more powerful data centres and more and more intelligent services.

This is the kind of mega computing infrastructure that will probably ultimately end up hosting AI the way things are headed with intelligent search etc etc

I do think though ultimately, you'll see a much bigger use of small and media data centres closer to markets. As power goes up, getting ping times down will matter more and more.

So, I think you'll probably eventually have big specialised super nodes and mirroring and rapid access services located in nearly telephone exchange type locations cross connected and peered with local ISPs

4ensic15 · 20-09-2015 5:23pm

Deleted User wrote: »

Maybe you missed my earlier reply so here it is again, distributed datastores require massive high speed data networks and very reliable synchronisation software to function.

I never said anything about distributed data stores. What I am saying is that there will be no need based on climate for data centres in Ireland.

plodder · 20-09-2015 6:14pm

4ensic15 wrote: »

If things keep progressing at the rate they have since, the rationale for siting data centres (moderate climate) in Ireland will disappear. An object the size of a brick will hold as much date as the Athenry centre and will be capable of surviving equally well in the desert of the South Pole. That is why all this crowing with joy about the location of a data centre is ridiculuos. Dell came and went. Gateway 2000 came and went. Call centres came and many relocated to India. The list goes on. For a few construction and cleaning jobs Athenry will be left with a derelict heap of concrete in a few years. It will do as much for the town as the tobelerone houses did for the holiday resorts.

They may be called 'data centres' but they do a lot more than just store data. There is a considerable amount of processing in terms of transactions, generating content and delivering it. Ironically, Moore's law has increased the demand for power because more transistors, switching at ever faster speeds, means greater use of electric power.

Not so sure about your climate change argument either. If the temperature here changes by more than a degree or two, we'll have bigger things to worry about.

StonyIron · 20-09-2015 6:36pm

Yup. They're not data warehouses (well not totally).

Apple will be processing a lot of data for things like Siri, searches, delivering ever increasing interactivity for mobile devices.

As more and more of these devices have very high capacity broadband connections they Dan plug into hugely powerful cloud based (just a fancy term for centralised) services.

In effect the PC age where you'd everything on your desktop is coming to a very rapid end and we're already moving to a hyper connected world where devices are effectively using what is the modem equivalent of mainframes.

4ensic15 · 20-09-2015 6:48pm

plodder wrote: »

They may be called 'data centres' but they do a lot more than just store data. There is a considerable amount of processing in terms of transactions, generating content and delivering it. Ironically, Moore's law has increased the demand for power because more transistors, switching at ever faster speeds, means greater use of electric power.

Not so sure about your climate change argument either. If the temperature here changes by more than a degree or two, we'll have bigger things to worry about.

I said nothing about climate change. These centres are being located whre they are because of the ambient moderate climate. technical development will mean that the ambient climate will not be a factor. When that happens other factors will emerge and its bye bye Athenry.

Apple Data Centre Athenry = Middle of Nowhere.

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