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NSA's New Utah Data Center Suffering Meltdowns
linuxwrangler writes "NSA's new Utah data-center has been suffering numerous power-surges that have caused as much as $100,000 damage per event. The root cause is 'not yet sufficiently understood' but is suspected to relate to the site's 'inability to simultaneously run computers and keep them cool.' Frustrating the analysis and repair are 'incomplete information about the design of the electrical system' and the fact that "regular quality controls in design and construction were bypassed in an effort to fast track the Utah project."" Ars Technica has a short article, too, as does ITworld.
Hmm...so your equipment is randomly failing...you don't say?
Save yourself some trouble and stop spying on your own people then.
It probably lacks certification from the Department of Redundancy Department anyway...
in the 'new america' you can't know if this kind of article is a fishing trap to find people who vocally disagree with the NSA.
it seems like east germany from a decade or two (or 3) ago. people were always wondering who is a spy. the guy next door? your teacher? your boss? you never knew. the mistrust ran very deep.
welcome to the new USA where the same feelings are now 'imported' and we wonder who is real, who is a plant and who is a double agent. we have to worry about everything we say and if it could be taken out of context or misinterpreted.
great. just great. chilling effect on steroids.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The only thing that will save us from the massive dragnet of the NSA is apparently the incompetence of the NSA.
The submission had one article, the editors linked to two more.
ALL THREE ARTICLES REFERENCE & LINK TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Is it so hard to include a link to the source of this story? /. does this far too often and I hope to see better in the future
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304441404579119490744478398.html
(Google Cache just in case
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
They probably used a power budget similar to the public Facebook datacenter data but then decided to run their machines on Windows Azure.
I have noticed that power consumption of my computers is significantly higher when running Windows - and the laptops have seriously reduced battery life, even while doing nothing.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
The NSA started scanning itself causing infinite recursion....like looking at yourself through a mirror through a mirror, except digitally. I have infinite bank accounts and I have infinite hits on cougarfinder.com
Someone explain to me why the holy bloody fuck these enemies of the American people haven't taken an involuntary 8-day vacation along with the rest of the noncritical federal government?
I'm conflicted about your post. I think it's good to point out why the NSA spying on everything is a good thing to people who might otherwise be apathetic, but I think you engage in hyperbole which might cause more people to ignore the situation and write it off as paranoia.
Maybe suggest that COULD happen if we don't take steps to pare down the NSA now rather than suggesting it's something you're already worried about.
Not saying you're wrong, just that the NSA is spending a lot of time and effort (and money) on PR to convince the public they have nothing to fear. We need to similarly think about PR concerns in order to have a chance of opposing it.
I'm less convinced that it will actually be used against the evil. Especially in the resulting balance of use.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
We'll just be footing the bill.
. . .eats huge amounts of power, not large amounts of water for cooling.
And thus, power requirements go up, pushing the limits of your provisioned electrical infrastructure.
And extremely-high-capacity circuit breakers tend to be explody when they fail. My guess: someone used some REALLY bad assumptions for electrical infrastructure planning. . .
I, for one, definitely trust an outfit that can't size a bloody datacenter power distribution system to build those magic technical safeguards that are allegedly allowing a spying operation of unprecedented size to occur with no abuses (And that's no bullshit!)
I wonder if we could convince them to switch to a utility that conducts background checks on electrons before sending them to the customer? That would clearly help...
Wow are they hosting Apples mapping application?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
'incomplete information about the design of the electrical system'
Well, duh, it's secret.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
afterall google revealed a good amount on how they go about building their data centers and keeping it cool. But then again, contractors...
Rule #1 of government spending: why by one, when you can have two at twice the price?
Rule #2 of government spending: a penny saved is a spending oversight.
Who knew that The Prisoner would be a template for America less than fifty years later. I just wish my computer and phone would spray drugs at me on occasion. "Be seeing you"
Trust me as a Mormon and at Utahn I very must distrust the government, and have been dismayed and angered that this monster has found a home in my state.
This isn't the result of incompetence - rather the result of trying to racing to finish the thing before any more opposition builds up that may stop the project. Wile E. Coyote trying to run on air, knowing it's impossible, but trying to get to the cliff before gravity notices the flagrant violation.
When that monster is done - and it seems that they are turning it on *right now*, this week - human history is done as we understand it. We will all behave as though someone is watching and recording us, because they will be.
Scientology is going to *love* this - one stop shopping for all its spying needs. The NSA just last week asked permission for private corporations to access their new trove of data, Because Terrorism. The Unification Church and Scientology will be first in line with front corporations to drink deep of this wonderful new integrated terrorism enabling center - terrorism because bad guys like Scientology will be able to terrorize people with fresh, holistic super-knowledge not only of who they are, what they say, what they read and where they've been, but also of everyone their enemies ever talk to, email, walk next to, text or write to. That center isn't about just metadata, it's the *actual phone conversations* that will be recorded. Don't ever piss off the powerful, 'cause they can nail you and anyone who ever contacts you until you give up. Blackmail, extortion, we-know-where-you-kids-are... anything. And the coolest part is that it will all be secret! Persecutors with behind stage access to the NSA superboxes and analytic tools won't even be logged in any real sense. Political opposition, nullified, instantly. The possibilities for our brave new world owners are limitless.
Maybe they shouldn't have built it in Utah?
More likely they didn't account in the power budget for the seven secret sub-basements and the underground vacutrain for the reptoids to commute from the Denver International Airport.
honestly, it's like the right hand doesn't know what the left talon is doing these days.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The NSA doesn't need you or I or our children to spy for them. Everything they want to know is willingly provided to them, by us, in real time. The Stasi had informants everywhere, which put people on their guard. Most people today don't think twice about saying things, because there are no daily reminders that somebody could be listening. That's far more frightening, in my book.
My guess: someone used some REALLY bad assumptions for electrical infrastructure planning. . .
Hey, don't be too hard on the electrical engineers - James Clapper told them that the power requirements would be really low.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
From: "The Edge Of Darkness" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090424
"Craven: The word azure is a police intelligence term. It means the room is bugged or under some sort of electronic surveillance"
A perfect name for a cloud computing product.
If they fast-tracked the project, they probably didn't have an electrical engineer do a load analysis.
In my experience, some engineer probably DID the analysis, but they ignored him/her because it would take too long to do it right. The revision 1 Blue prints where already under contract and it would take too long to process a change order. Of course, everybody KNEW that the design had a fatal flaw, at least until the program management started leaving like rats from a sinking ship and their replacements where not aware (or told) of the problems.
The original engineer is then tasked with fixing the problem with about 1/4 the resources necessary and no authority to actually make any changes to the project. Every time there is a power failure and equipment gets smoked, the engineer is blamed for not having the "problem" fixed. His performance rating takes a dive at the next performance review and he either quits in frustration or gets fired.
That's what happens in large government projects... At least in my experience...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Works for Switch in Las Vegas. Cold in winter and cools off at night so 70% of annual hours they can pull in ambient air through filters. Evaporative cooling, whether direct or to cool the hot-side of a refrigerated system, works best in dry climates but it's only used to improve efficiency as they can run fine with air-cooling albeit at much higher power costs.
I'm still surprised at the number of places that think cooling is optional. We had equipment in a Sacramento data-center that had plenty of backup electricity for servers but couldn't run the AC in a power outage. The SLA only had provisions for exceeding 80-degrees for more than something like 90 or 120 minutes. *Ahem*, cold-comfort when a dense data-center can blow through 100 in minutes without AC.
UC Berkeley had a widespread power outage about a week ago. The main campus data center had power but, you guessed it, couldn't run cooling and had to "gracefully" shut down most of the core systems while watching the center breach 100F.
But I agree with your base assumption - really bad planning and/or execution on the power systems.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
to a nicer data center...
I'm sure it won't last, nothing this good ever does, but let's enjoy it while we can.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Doesn't it depend on your definition of evil? To a dedicated Statist, the Bill of Rights is "just a damned piece of paper" in which the rights of the Polity are fully enumerated - until exigencies make them inconvenient. The danger is that only dedicated Statists make it to the highest positions of Authority.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
Maybe you missed the article a few days ago about how the US is barring critics/dissidents from entering the country? Not criminals, not "terrorists", simply people who disagree cannot travel freely. This really is a police state now, and it's only a matter of time before the 1st Amendment becomes about as well honored as the 2nd, which is to say wholly selectively suiting the needs of the state based on arbitrary standards the founders were explicitly against in their writings.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
If only they could harness that chilling effect to cool their data centers, then the NSA would be good to go.
" it's only a matter of time before the 1st Amendment becomes about as well honored as the 2nd"
It's about time we had reasonable, common sense restrictions on the press. Scented inserts and metallic type should be illegal in magazines. No one needs high speed printing presses which can automatically feed reams of paper - they should be restricted for government and military use. Private citizens will still be able to use hand fed mimeograph machines, so their rights won't be violated. Anyone publishing news should have to be licensed, with a journalism degree from an accredited university.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
A friend of mine is researching power surges in the local town.
Most building codes under-specify the gauge of the neutral/return wire. For illustration, if you have three phases each rated for N amps, there is one shared neutral/return wire rated at N amps going out. At the end of the runs all phases are connected to the shared neutral line.
This is due to the nature of 3-phase electricity: the phases will tend to cancel out, so in a perfect setup you would need no neutral/return at all. Of course, the load on each phase won't exactly balance, and the load can vary as people connect/disconnect appliances, so you still need the neutral line in practice.
(Not true for house wiring, which has one or two phases coming in. Each phase has a return with the same gauge as the supply.)
This was fine when appliances were (generally) resistive loads, but nowadays switch-mode power supplies are common. When you do some math, it turns out that this type of load appears equivalent to 120 Hz power coming together at the neutral/return junction. Since 120 Hz [equivalent] power does not cancel out, the power in the return wire can be 3x as large as the building codes allow.
I've got a book explaining all this. Typically the neutral line will heat up and catch fire, breaking the circuit. Once that happens the various phases are connected without a neutral, playing hob with whatever is on those circuits and making occasional high-power ground loops and other unexpected behaviours.
Maybe you missed the article a few days ago about how the US is barring critics/dissidents from entering the country?
Odd, I check /. every day, and I do not recall such an article. But I have noticed on occasion that "new" articles will show up in between two articles that I already checked, so I guess I may have missed it.
Care to link it? My google-fu is rather weak.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/10/02/1339247/german-nsa-critic-denied-entry-to-the-us
HOWEVER,
... the story only shows that German media outlets are not familiar with US entry regulations. He says that he was denied a visa last year, which automatically disqualifies him from the visa waiver program. This is just a garden-variety ESTA issue, and most likely has nothing to do with his stance of the NSA surveillance.
The problem with writing something such as the above is that many people lack sarcasm detectors, and will take it seriously.
Such comments ought to be banned.
Remember when the claim that the NSA knew everyone you talked to on the phone was tinfoil hat crazy (because the NSA NEVER spies on citizens)? Seems it was right on the mark.
you know what's different between the NSA 2013 and the Stasi? Immidiate consequences. If someone informed on you doing something the government didn't like, they'd be dealt with immediatly. This helped connect the idea in people's minds that constant government survaleance = bad thing. Right now, that's not happening. NSA has all this data, but they haven't done anything with it that people can see. That doesn't mean its harmless, it just means that people can't see the harm yet.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Not saying you're wrong, just that the NSA is spending a lot of time and effort (and money) on PR to convince the public they have nothing to fear. We need to similarly think about PR concerns in order to have a chance of opposing it.
Riker, his face palmed. Shaka when the walls fell.
Dathon and Picard, the beast of El-Adrel!
Snowden, his files open.
Darmok and Jilad at Tenagra...
Head shaking Nixon at Watergate!
Feynman at NASA, The frozen ring:
Have gnu, will travel.
Did they check "the cloud" for lightning?
in the 'new america' you can't know if this kind of article is a fishing trap to find people who vocally disagree with the NSA.
Um, ok, then this is bad! Bad bad bad! I hope the NSA fixes their problems soon.
Love,
-A loyal civilian
More Twoson than Cupertino
There are millions who never even use Facebook or Twitter. Millions more who use it for news and commentary. Just because a subset of the population publishes every meal they eat, doesn't mean that all people wish to be monitored.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
He was later granted a visa, however. So your point fails.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.