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Town Expands To Boost Cooling For NSA Data Center
1sockchuck writes "A substantial water supply is critical for most large data centers. A case in point: Officials in Bluffdale, Utah have agreed to annex land housing a new $1.2 billion data center for the National Security Agency. The move makes the NSA a higher priority customer for Bluffdale's water utility, which prevents its water supply from a potential cutoff in the event of a water shortage — which would be a problem, since water will be used extensively in the data center's cooling system. Many large data centers have been working to reduce their water use to make them more sustainable and reliable."
They are afraid the water might be able to be reassembled in such a way as to show the data that the computers were processing when it cooled them.
For God's sake don't tell them I
One does wonder why the NSA chose that particular climate to build a big, water-hungry datacenter...(and what inducements the town leadership accepted for the... good fortune... of having its water allocated to the NSA first and its citizens second.)
If they do the plumbing right, all they need to do is channel the hot water into a facility for rest and relaxation. For that matter, it could also be used in other ways. There has got to be a better way than this to make use of this hot water.
Better -- stop the NSA domestic spying.
A significant problem with making a hotspring resort fed by an NSA datacenter is the extreme danger imposed by an inadvertant WikiLeak, and it's effect on the local infrastructure. Liquid NSA data running all over Utah might have unknown effects on the local environment.