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Huge Data Center Going Up In Sin City
pacopico writes "The Register has a report on an intriguing Las Vegas-based company which is building one of the world's largest data centers called the SuperNAP. The company — Switch Communications — claims it will be the most densely packed and power efficient data center ever built. The report notes, 'Legend has it that the company managed to acquire what was once meant to be Enron's broadband trading hub for a song. This gave Switch access to more than twenty of the primary carrier backbones in a single location. Switch tied this vast network to existing data center hosting facilities and attracted military clients, among others, to its Las Vegas shop.'"
will it run linux?!
Whatever happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
They just need to hire Marv. That should work well. Just make sure he doesn't bleed everywhere.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
They could probably make a fortune just acting as a switching node, routing data between carriers.
Isn't Las Vegas.... warm? Seems like it will require lots of cooling.
And here I thought a SuperNAP is what Chuck Norris takes after eating an AwesomeBar!
-- Jay Leno
Switch and Data is already in the colo-exchange point business in a big way. I wonder if Switch Communications has already received their cease and desist letter.
Does anyone know any companies installed there/going to install there? I'd be curious about how the price will be.
The Indians, as in Native Americans, didn't seem to have a problem.
There's big betting bucks here!
I've done due diligence visits to a couple of their sites in Las Vegas. Professional facilities and they host for a lot of Las Vegas casinos and companies.
I didn't get too far into the peering side of things, but I remember them talking up the amount of fiber that runs through the Las Vegas valley.
It will be bleeding-edge!
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
It gets awfully hot in Vegas. The way energy prices are going, how about putting a facility like this in, e.g., Edmonton? I realize that cold places probably don't have very good connectivity, but that seems like a solvable problem. Put the thing in the basement of the West Edmonton Mall or the Mall of America and heat the whole place with it (just kidding).
Ocean's 2^11
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It belongs to those defrauded by Enron until it is sold off at a fair market price. "For a song" is not a fair market price.
The only worse outcome would be to find out that those with insider information on Enron (former executives, management, etc.), fully aware of how this asset would be sold off, were found to be the new "owners".
I work very close to where is data center is going in, and the area is horrible for telecommunications. With all the construction, lines are accidentally cut on a regular basis. A few weeks ago, all data/telco lines in the area went down for most of the day.
The same contact - a data center expert - suspects that Switch will struggle to power the SuperNAP. "They're in the middle of the desert and will need almost 3 million gallons of water per day for blowdown and evaporation for their 30,000 ton evaporative cooling plant." This is all very fascinating, but is there any way this place really needs 3 million gallons of water per day? That just seems extreme. That can't be right. Can it?
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
earlier this year there were numerous reports of how Lake Mead could become so low that power generation becomes impossible. Something was said about the last 10 or so years being over 1 million acre feet of water less than normal per year. Keeping that trend for another 10 showed the Colorado River dam systems too low to sustain populations with power and drinking water.
So these people may have a huge data center but they might want either a 10 year exit strategy or start building their own solar and/or wind power generation systems to sustain their operation.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Had a bit of trouble figuring out which one was sin city.....Tel Aviv? Moscow?......no, must be Las Vegas. I suppose it's comforting to know that the US doesn't have a monopoly on 'sin', although arguably some other places might laugh at the idea that gambling is sin.
Qxe4
I cant wait to see their in-house production of TRON produced by Cirque Du Soleil!
"Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines."
They claim to be cutting edge & everything yet they are using the same old evaporative cooling that every other commercial building uses. How about using something more sustainable in the long run like geothermal. Commercial geothermal may be more expensive up front but dumping the heat in the ground will save so much money and water in the long run. 3 MILLION gallons a day is retarded. Talk about wasteful, especially in a desert area.
The LA to LV corridor has always been a main rail corridor, it was LV's reason for existence in the first place, and rail lines are where the fiber goes. And except for the 100 miles or so between Barstow and the state line, it's solid suburbia all the way from the coast to LV. LA and LV are twin cities!
California is basically out of electricity capacity, has earthquakes, and land and taxes are expensive, so Nevada is not only an economy unto itself, but a nearby tax haven. No coincidence that Las Vegas and Reno, the only two cities of any size in NV, are right across the border.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Snowfall in the Rockies was way, way above average and runoff into rivers like the Colorado should be correspondingly higher. Droughts do not last forever, you can't take a ten year sample and predict river flow in ten years!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're already planning their own power station. From the article "Switch is bringing in 30 cooling towers and its own power station to fill the SuperNAP with 7,000 cabinets of hardware and 1,500 watts per square foot of energy."
Software Inventor
FTFA:
Page 1: "Legend has it that the company managed to acquire what was once meant to be Enron's broadband trading hub for a song."
Page 3: "Enron had already built a lot of the infrastructure needed for its facility and brought the major carriers on board just as its business started to collapse. So, the broadband center went up for sale.
"We were the only ones that bid on it," Roy said. "It should have been the $200bn companies that owned it. We got it for a Cinderella story type of figure."
If the facility was sold off as part of the bankruptcy proceedings, it's sold. Whatever you think 'fair market price' means, it doesn't apply when it comes to bankruptcy firesales, where the creditors are trying to recoup whatever they can from their investments, and don't necessarily have the patience to sit around and wait for the 'fair market price'.
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
I thought that maybe someone set up a Vegas sim in SecondLife, and built a simple API to SecondLife's Real Life APIs (that program SecondLife world functions from real world computers) that avatars (not their human players) could program easily in-game. Maybe by sitting at animated PC in the game, or just by waving around some "magic" items and saying some "magic spells" (or picking up a phone and talking to "Central Services").
A virtual machine that avatars could program, which converts or interprets the avatars' "programming" actions into "real" code that runs in SecondLife's real datacenters.
I think such a service could crank out quite a few LindenDollars.
--
make install -not war
I always do a double take to see Vegas referred to as Sin City, when the original is a suburb of Cincinnati, which makes much more sense, as a play on words.
I guess this means a new server for World of Warcraft! Maybe I can get my Shaman moved over and I won't have to wait in queue....LOL
Don't fear the penguins
A recent article (Feb 2008) in National Geographic magazine http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/drying-west/kunzig-text/2 reports: "a comprehensive study of climate models reported in Science predicted the Southwest's gradual descent into persistent Dust Bowl conditions by mid-century" I have to question the wisdom of investing large amounts in desert areas.