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Huge Data Center Going Up In Sin City

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-power-please dept.

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.'"

3 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Heat by Iphtashu+Fitz · · Score: 4, Informative

    True, but so are places like Dallas, San Diego, etc. and they all have huge datacenters. Beside, Vegas as a lot of relative cheap electricity thanks to the likes of the Hoover Dam, etc. That's the main reason why Vegas is so big and always lit up like a friggin' Christmas Tree on steroids. Prior to the power plant at Hoover Dam coming on-line the city was pretty much like any other city in the USA.

  2. Switch Does Have Some Good Facilities by bastion_xx · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Heat by hackstraw · · Score: 5, Informative


    I thought about heat, cooling, power, all the standard data center stuff, then I thought. Well, Isn't Vegas a great place for solar? Not a mention of it in the article. It mentions needing 3 million gallons of water a day (not a commodity in the desert), they also say that the building was left over from the Enron fiasco.

    I don't know, to me something does not seem to add up here. They are advertising 3x the power density of the typical data center (1500 Watts/sq ft vs 500), and all that. Fortune 100 companies as companies, all that, but also the stuff where they get database feeds from databases that nobody knows about, and that they have a display that will immediately update whenever someone mentions the word bomb on an airplane (are airplanes wired that well now?).

    To me, the article leaves many more questions than answers. Something seems fishy with this, but maybe my tin foil hat is on too tightly today.