NSA To Build 20-Acre Data Center In Utah

Hugh Pickens writes "The Salt Lake City Tribune reports that the National Security Agency will be building a one million square foot data center at Utah's Camp Williams. The NSA's heavily automated computerized operations have for years been based at Fort Meade, Maryland, but the agency began looking to decentralize its efforts following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and accelerated their search after the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA — Baltimore Gas & Electric's biggest customer — had maxed out the local grid and could not bring online several supercomputers it needed to expand its operations. The agency got a taste of the potential for trouble January 24, 2000, when an information overload, rather than a power shortage, caused the NSA's first-ever network crash, taking the agency 3 1/2 days to resume operations. The new data center in Utah will require at least 65 megawatts of power — about the same amount used by every home in Salt Lake City — so a separate power substation will have to be built at Camp Williams to sustain that demand. 'They were looking at secure sites, where there could be a natural nexus between organizations and where space was available,' says Col. Scott Olson, the Utah National Guard's legislative liaison. NSA officials, who have a long-standing relationship with Utah based on the state Guard's unique linguist units, approached state officials about finding land in the state on which to build an additional data center. 'The stars just kind of came into alignment. We could provide them everything they need.'"

Comments

Hmm

[moogied]

Anyone else remember when the announcement of a government facility wasn't met with constant pessimism and assertions of ill-doing? Me either. I suppose thats our job as 'informed' citizens though.. to constantly second guess our government.

Nominal Intel servers use about 88W

[Anonymous Coward]

Nominal 8-core Intel servers use about 88 Watts now, not 500W. I performed a "green power review" for a customer this year. Their really old 8-core boxes used around 450W, before we replaced them for new and put 6 old physical servers onto each new physical server running VMs. We weren't even trying to push the minimal server solution and the new servers had 4GB RAM per core, so these aren't VM-specific servers, just normal current tech boxes. Also, we replaced all the internal drives beyond 2 for RAID1 boots with a redundant GigE SAN. Fairly cheap upgrades. Their old power draw was 18kVA and we dropped it to under 4kVA. Anyone want to trade out APC units? I know someone wasting power keeping their batteries charged.

Now, these weren't the big 24-128-way servers from HP, Sun, IBM, and Fujitsu with redundant fibre SAN and fibre networking, so your estimate could be very good. Some of those Cisco optics switches and routers can really pull power, especially if you use the power over ethernet features.

Re:American Money, American Land, American Calls

[rgviza]

Of course this is assuming no one on AT&T makes international calls, or no one internationally calls US AT&T customers, like terrorists contacting a cell that is operating here.

This is probably a small percentage of AT&T's calls... however, if they had any sense the terrorists would get those Go phones that don't require ID to purchase and activate, so yea, it's likely AT&T isn't very interesting to the NSA. But I'm also pretty sure that NSA would never underestimate the stupidity of extremists since you need to be pretty retarded to blow yourself up in the name of a religion that's been twisted to make violence OK.

Truth be told, nobody really knows what NSA does but NSA and possibly the president so anyone here is talking out of their ass because they don't work there. If they did, they won't be much longer ;)