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.'"

Comments

Re:Heat

[timeOday]

You're right, and it's a real shame what's become of the colorado river. Squandered to power gaudy lighting and air conditioning on overdrive for a locale which by its nature is uninhabitable.

Re:Heat

[johnrpenner]

The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems
cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle
of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them.
The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization
perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his
primitive night. (Jean Baudrillard)

they could have only 10 years to get self powered

[Locutus]

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

Re:Heat

[canuck57]

I do not understand why these mega data centers are mostly situated in hot areas. Not only is 1500 watts per square foot a lot of electricity, it takes a lot of cooling to counter the wattage.

And Hoover Dam, last time I saw it was near idle only running one turbine and the lake water was low.

It makes more sense to pick a location like Revelstoke BC. Near the Mica Dam. I have reasons:

• 1/2 the year, cool air is cheap
• Electricity is cheap, Mica @ 1800MW is comparable to Hoover without a city like Vega using it.
• Not all technical and support staff want to live in a concrete jungle
• There are fiber thought he area for Vancouver and Calgary NAPs and response is good for the mid-west and the east cost.

Ya, I know I am dreaming. Would be nice to drive 5-10 miles from work on a open not crowded highway to the boat launch on the way home. Ski-do in the winters. Maybe catch a Dolly Varden or Kokanee salmon. Maybe call it Google City, BC -- ah dreaming.

Virtual Vegas Machine

[Doc Ruby]

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.