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Construction begins on Reno iCloud facility
Apple's iCloud service is expanding rapidly, and the company is investing billions of dollars in infrastructure to support it. Recent stories have pointed to the massive photovoltaic array powering the Maiden, NC, data center, and last October Apple broke ground for a data center near Prineville, Ore. Now AppleInsider is reporting that Apple has completed construction of a small "tactical" structure at a data center site near Reno, Nev. The headline of the AppleInsider post is somewhat misleading (not to mention grammatically questionable), crowing that "Apple's initial iCloud facility in Reno already ready to go online." The tactical structure houses cooling, security and support equipment, and doesn't house any massive banks of servers or other infrastructure needed to house iCloud data. Similar structures are onsite at the Maiden data center and one has also been built on the Prineville site. Support buildings such as the one completed at the Reno data center are usually pre-fabricated and quick to build, housing compressors for chiller equipment used to dissipate the heat generated by banks of servers and storage devices in the primary data centers. There's still a lot of work to be done at the Reno site before it is fully operational.
Reno city council approves Apple tax break for data center
No big surprise here -- the Reno, NV city council has approved tax breaks for Apple's proposed data center and business / purchasing center in the city. The tax breaks are expected to produce a 79 percent reduction in Apple tax burden, but building the facilities should provide the northern Nevada city with a significant economic boost. Washoe County commissioners approved their part of the deal on Tuesday, giving Apple an 85 percent break on personal property taxes. The 350-acre data center still has a few hurdles to overcome, as the project must go through about a month-long approval process with the Nevada governor's economic development office. If all the approvals go smoothly, construction of the new Apple data center could begin as soon as August of 2012.
