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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.'"
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.
-- Jay Leno
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.
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.
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.
Well the article actually explains why they can archive that kind of density. Instead of trying to force cold air up through raised floors which air doesn't want to do they have build it so each rack of servers deliver their hot air into duct and sucks in cold air from the other side. (Isle between racks are cold, backs of racks are hot).
On top of that the desert is actually a pretty frigging cold place to be at night - which they again can use to their advantage. They talk about 4 different options for cooling what works in different types of conditions during the day/night.
Theres nothing fishy about it - its all science.
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)
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
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:
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.
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