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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.'"
Isn't Las Vegas.... warm? Seems like it will require lots of cooling.
-- Jay Leno
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 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".
The saying used to be "whatever happens in Enron, stays in Enron," but we can all see how well that worked out...
Maybe the fiber hub has built in packet shredders.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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
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?"
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.
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make install -not war