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Switch To Build Largest Data Center In the World In Reno
An anonymous reader writes: Data center provider Switch is planning to build a huge facility in Reno, Nevada, which it claims will be the largest data center campus in the world once completed. Switch has said that the SuperNap Reno campus will cost $3bn when fully built. The project will include seven data center buildings of the same size, totaling 6.49mn sq. ft.
They are not whole people.
Gonna turn Lake Tahoe into a giant hot tub?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
But does it run Linux?
In fact, forget the datacenter!
What about the heat? California has already sucked us dry as it is. HELP!!
Trivial to get enough energy from solar to power air con units.
Them Republicans love craps so much that they call themselves Democrats!!!
You're probably thinking Vegas.
Reno's much further north and closer to the mountains.
Average temperatures are far lower.
Still, as was pointed out, solar power in this area's still a good deal since they see about 40% sunshine throughout the year. There are months when this will be less, but those are also much cooler months of the year, when they can shunt outside air in.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
For solar Vegas would be a better choice.
Reno is in a valley, the floor doesn't get as much sunlight as it would if the region was flat. An extra hour or so of sunlight might seem trivial but in the long run it would add up.
Another factor is that Reno, Hells, all of Nevada, is HOT in the summer months so cooling during those months will be really expensive. But during the winter it gets near/below freezing most of the time so the cost might average out over the year.
Personally Reno would be the last place I would want to put a data center. During the time I lived there I met plenty of people who would have sold their sister into slavery to make a fast buck.
Would you want your data stored in a place where some of the staff would be likely to sell your data to anyone who offered enough money? Though on that thought I suppose the same can be said for any data center you don't own directly.
"I'm gonna build my own data center, with blackjack and hookers!"
Not a lot of options left for nuclear power in the region, so solar & wind will be a good bet for efficient power generation.
The biggest little server farm in the world
What's that in metric units?
Has the environmental impact of such megalithic data centers (both of building one and running one) ever been computed ? Wait, you'd need another data center to... aw, sh***.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Thanks for making it easier of the enemy to destroy a whole lot of websites and data-vaults with one missile!
All they have to do is nuke Reno the week before Labor Day. Screw up I-80 that week and the Internet is f*k'd for quite a while.
This is very weird. Whenever I click on the link to stack.com Firefox asks if I want to open an 11.9K GZip archive. Other links on the stack.com front page have a similar issue. Is anybody else having this problem?
Yeah.
You're building all the solar plants in CA and getting all your water from Lake Meade.
???
I realize that we are in a new age where there are people who like to brag about how they think pans are incredibly sexy, but I don't see why it is important to know that the guy making this data center is a switch.
Let's say 8 hours of useful sunshine a day, times 40% of days, gives an average of a little over three hours a day. Not much use.
And before someone jumps in ans says the panels will still generate electricity on a cloudy day, yes they do generate a small amount. But only 15-30%, not enough to make much difference.
I get the same behavior
And it'll be funded by the NSA, so you know it'll be good!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I see the same thing. In the immortal words of whatshisname, "Something's fucky..."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Be careful, the link to "thestack.com" appears to be polluted, and clicking it will attempt to download an 11.6G file.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Nonsense. I lived in Reno many years ago. It's "high desert" - summertime extreme highs are in the low 90's, and it cools down to low 70's at night. The humidity is low year-round, as is precipitation. Sunshine is abundant. Linky. As to your slander of the residents, perhaps you should have spent more time hanging out with people NOT in the casino industry.
Stop replying to you own stupid troll posts.
If it gets to the point of nukes landing on Reno we'll have much bigger problems than this data center.
As a 13 year resident, I'd suggest your assertions are either out of date, or completely incorrect.
Yes it gets hot in summer. However, Switch must know how to manage heat well, since their current data center is located near Las Vegas, which gets much hotter for much longer. And Reno has lots of solar, wind, and geothermal to tap before switching to the nat gas power plant.
As to your description of the location, you're a bit too far west...the data center is located in the same area as the current Apple data center, and the Tesla gigafactory, which is east of the valley. Note that Apple seems to manage the heat, so well in fact that they're making noises about a major expansion.
As to the residents of Reno, you're absolutely correct. We're all horrible, evil, nasty beasts. Please stay away. WE'RE FULL!
Seriously, the biggest concerns at this point are water (we're in a 4th year of drought), and population growth. While its great that my home value has skyrocketed since the gigafactory announcement, we're all concerned about the expected 5000 new households expected in the next few years; thats a lot of growth to absorb and we're already pushing hte limits of our infrastructure.
The server is sending the HTML for the article in a gzip file. The 11kb file is actually just the webpage. You can view it with zcat.
I think that the server has been hacked to inject adds because it shows the following:
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No, that's 40% out of the total 8760 hours a year.
That's, on average, 9.6 hours of sunlight a day. Longer in the summer, when they really need it for power. Shorter in the winter, when they don't need it as badly.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What is it in square furlong?
The idea isn't necessarily for a *complete* offset. But, with enough solar area, they can put a dent in their power bill.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Reno has a bad reputation which is entirely false. The massive influx of people from the Bay area has changed things significantly here, hell, our republican governor just passed a bill that invests nearly a Billion dollars in our fledgling education system.
Regarding power: look at this map that shows the potential for geothermal in northern nevada:
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Screen-Shot-2014-08-08-at-11.18.14-AM.png
Geothermal is available 24x7 and unlike solar wind and hydro it is not affected by climate change.
Switch was very proud of their Las Vegas datacenter when they built it. I'm sure Reno will be very proud.
But I'm not so sure that bigger is better. I remember being hosted by an industry leader a dozen years ago from a small self-storage unit. Times have changed.
Switch's SuperNAPs are 1000x more secure than that old storage unit. But now a backhoe can compromise 10million servers instead of 10000. And a power failure requires a pipeline into the generators instead of a single 5000 liter delivery truck.
I'm coloed in a Switch facility. I have to do the whole bio-security shakedown everytime I need physical access. But I don't feel more secure. And, although I'm multi-homed, of course, it's funny how often the simplest things can knock out a leg.
I don't think their state-of-the-art cooling and fire-supression systems are more efficient in their 10-meter tall facilities than less-state-of-the-art systems were in 3-meter tall buildings.
I'd feel better and more secure if there were ten 60K sq. m. datacenters instead of one 600K sq. m datacenter. Then, one power failure, fire, earthquake, car bomb, etc. has much smaller effect.
There are so many wrong "facts" and conjectures here, I had to log in and correct them. I was born in Reno and raised nearby, and I've been in the area many times, unlike just about all of you.
What is now an industrial park was formerly a ranch, and, despite being in the middle of a mountain range, has enough flat land within to allow all of this building. At the north end of this ranch is the Truckee River, along with runs Interstate-80 (old US Highway 400 and the Southern Pacific Railroad, the first trans-continental railroad. The first trans-con telegraph and telephone also ran through here, and a lot of fiber does as well, Reno to Salt Lake City.
This is high desert, around 4-5k-feet in elevation at the bottom, and gets snow in winter, usually not more than a couple of inches, very rarely several feet via backdoor fronts (from the east so the Sierra Nevada and Cascade rain shadow has no effect). Typical winter lows are single digits and teens (in Fahrenheit), with records dropping well below zero. Summer highs used to be only 100 a couple days of the year, but thanks to that climate change, 100+ is becoming somewhat more common now. The all time record high is 108.
The location for the Gigafactory and these datacenters is directly off I-80 about 11 miles east of Sparks (USA Parkway aka NV-439, I-80 Exit 32 to Vista Blvd Exit 21; these exit numbers are miles from the California state line). It is nowhere near Lake Tahoe: from the Gigafactory to Incline Village, Google Maps shows 56.4 miles, or 34 miles using the measurement tool (as the crow flies).
As I mentioned, there is a lot of fiber in this canyon: ones I know about from 8 years ago when I left are MCI, Worldcom (separate systems), Williams, and Nevada Bell (now AT&T once again, but their local version). Sprint enters Reno from the north as it uses the Union Pacific RR, while AT&T doesn't follow a railroad, and their eastbound fiber instead goes down to the state capital Carson City before going east (they didn't care about latency back then). There are also now direct fiber connections to Las Vegas (the signs say Nevada Bell, but I have good word there is a lot of dark/dim fiber being utilized there), which follows US-95, and a 3rd party fiber running down US-395 to provide broadband to the California communities on the east side of the Sierra, though the south end terminates in Barstow and the north end in Reno. One issue here is that all these fiber routes converge on Reno, so some sort of ring will have to be used to prevent the "eggs in one basket" scenario discussed by some posters as far as connectivity. (Outside of connectivity, you should have multiple data centers, obviously.)
Power may be a problem. There is a planned 500kV line running between Reno and Las Vegas, but AFAIK it still hasn't been built: the original intention was to ship (renewable) power between north and south, as N/S connections east of California are lacking. However, they may be needed to supply all these new data centers instead, though some power has become available thanks to a lot of the casinos going belly-up. Presently the vast majority of power in western Nevada comes from two 345 kV lines, one coming from Alturas and thence from the Columbia River, and the other, older one coming from NE Nevada from some coal plants that may be going away soon. There are also some peaker and upgraded-to-combined-cycle plants at Tracy very close to the Gigafactory and datacenters. The Path 27 HVDC line runs N/S around 20 miles to the east and has no connections here, its mid-path.
Meanwhile, despite the latitude (39.5), this area gets LOTS of sunshine, particularly in summer, helped by the Sierra/Cascade rain shadow as I mentioned, along with being far enough west (119.5--120 West is the California/Nevada state line as well as the Alberta/BC line and is further west than Los Angeles) to miss out on most of the North American Monsoon that gives the 4 Corners states their summer rainy season. The only catch is that, being mountain
I am working on this project, its big and we are moving a lot of dirt. Pads for two buildings are at sub-grade.