The Omaha, Nebraska, metropolitan area is again going to be reminded of the importance of network switch racks. Already the location to many data base centers as it is, this midwestern city found out this month that Facebook will be building a new data center in Papillion, a suburb just a short drive from Omaha, the largest city in the state of Nebraska.
And while the initial construction and implementation will include a 146-acre campus with two 450,000-square-foot buildings. Additionally, a 70,000-square-foot administrative building will make up part of Facebook’s ninth worlwide data center, the sixth in the U.S. If all goes as planned, the major construction project will be completed in about 18 months. Infrastructure officials for the project said the data center is expected to be online sometime in the year 2020.
Although the announcement of the large data center may have been a surprise to some, the deal has been in the making for years. Nebraska, sometimes dubbed as the increasingly well known Silicon Prairie, is already the home of many other large data centers like Cabela’s, Fidelity, Travelers, and Yahoo. The fact of the matter is locating near other data centers creates an ideal ecosystem for technology companies to thrive, according to Facebook officials. The plan is for this Facebook location to be one of the most advanced and energy-efficient data centers in the world. The local Omaha Public Power District will allow Facebook to power the facility solely through wind-generated electricity, which meets with Facebook’s goal of using 50% clean and renewable energy in its electricity supply mix for any new data centers opened after the year 2018.
Although this large data project will bring as many as 1,000 temporary construction jobs initially, once built the center will only have 100 permanent jobs. Once the new data center is online, the data center will operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The Importance of Network Switch Racks Is Magnified in the Largest of Data Centers
As more and more of the nation’s, and the world’s, economy focuses on digital technology it makes sense that the importance of network switch racks and other types of server racks is more apparent. For while data centers have a large footprint, they are are for the most part a housing for servers and data. A skeletal staff develops, monitors, and tests the equipment, but the majority of the work is completed by the machines themselves.
Consider some of these facts and figures about the data center storage industry:

• $180 billion was the end-user spending on cloud services going into the year 2015.
• 82% of companies reported saving money by moving their data storage and other tasks to the cloud.
• 25% of respondents indicate that they would choose storage if given the choice of only being able to move one application to the cloud.
• $79.1 billion is the predicted global market for cloud equipment by the year 2018.
• 38% of large companies were expected to exceed IT capacity within 18 months, according to a survey conducted in the year 2011.
• 14% of companies downsized their IT after cloud adoption.