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.'"

Wow.

They could probably make a fortune just acting as a switching node, routing data between carriers.

Heat

Isn't Las Vegas.... warm? Seems like it will require lots of cooling.

Re:Heat

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.

Re:Heat

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.

Tell that to the indians

The Indians [lvpaiutetribe.com], as in Native Americans, didn't seem to have a problem.

Re:Heat

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)

Re:Heat

I agree. Los Angeles should be abandoned and you can give us folks upstream all that water and power back.

But to make my point a little more seriously, every single city in the country is by nature uninhabitable for the number of people we have there. That's just as true for New York, Chicago, and LA as for Las Vegas and Phoenix. Southern Nevada has a tiny fraction of the population of Southern California, and uses a proportionately small amount of the water and power from the Colorado River. So why is it Las Vegas that gets criticized?

Re:Heat

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.

Re:Heat

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.

Re:

the desert is actually a pretty frigging cold place to be at night - which they again can use to their advantage

Except it's not cold in the city at night. Daytime heat builds up in the concrete etc and it is released during the night. They are not building the facility out in 'the desert' where they might be able to take advantage of the conditions you suggest.

Proximity to California Effect

The LA to LV corridor has always been a main rail corridor, it was LV's reason for existence in the first place, and rail lines are where the fiber goes. And except for the 100 miles or so between Barstow and the state line, it's solid suburbia all the way from the coast to LV. LA and LV are twin cities!

California is basically out of electricity capacity, has earthquakes, and land and taxes are expensive, so Nevada is not only an economy unto itself, but a nearby tax haven. No coincidence that Las Vegas and Reno, the only two cities of any size in NV, are right across the border.

Re:Heat

Sorry, but Vegas only gets small percentage of the power from Hoover Dam, like around 20%. That, and the fact that there won't be enough water to support its population in 10-20 years means it's a bad place for a datacenter. I'm not trying to diss Vegas, I was born and raised there, but this sounds like a bad idea.

Re:Heat

Hoover Dam

Yeah, great, except Lake Mead is at its lowest level ever since it was made by the dam. The South-West is in a serious multi-year drought and predictions have it that if it continues, in 10-15 years there won't be enough water running through the dam to turn a single turbine. What then?

Re:Heat

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 [wikipedia.org]. I have reasons:

• 1/2 the year, cool air is cheap
• Electricity is cheap, Mica @ 1800MW is comparable to Hoover without a city like Vega using it.
• Not all technical and support staff want to live in a concrete jungle
• There are fiber thought he area for Vancouver and Calgary NAPs and response is good for the mid-west and the east cost.

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.

Re:

Las Vegas does not get any power from Hoover Dam unless it's purchased on the open market. The power generated by the Hoover Dam belongs to California and Arizona. If Nevada receives any power generated by the Hoover Dam, it's because it's purchased throug

Re:Heat

Prior to the Hoover Dam coming on line (i.e., pre-World-War II), there wasn't a city there.

Which is one of the great things about Vegas. It's the archetype of artifact, and a wonderful model for future terraforming operations. Especially the hookers and blackjack part. In fact, forget the city...

Re:

That's not exactly true. Prior to the dam, Boulder City did not exist. It was a town that sprung up entirely for the purpose of housing the workers that built the dam, which was completed in 1935. Las Vegas itself was established in 1905 and officially

Gratuitous Enron Joke...

Just in case we ever forget...

"In Houston this week they had an auction for Enron. They sold all kinds of things that were once property of Enron. Lots of good deals -- in fact I picked up 2 senators and a congressman. Hell of a deal."

-- Jay Leno

Who else thought of a new game...

where folks bet on:

• Down time.
• Data loss.
• Which server goes down.
• Who gets a sale.
• and on and on.

There's big betting bucks here!

Switch Does Have Some Good Facilities

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.

Re:

The thing about vegas is the town quadrupled in size in the last 10-15 years. So all the infrastructure is new. And the city was good about zoning everything underground. So there are giant 32" conduits running everywhere. Most of these are owned by th

they could have only 10 years to get self powered

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

Stupid cooling strategy

They claim to be cutting edge & everything yet they are using the same old evaporative cooling that every other commercial building uses. How about using something more sustainable in the long run like geothermal. Commercial geothermal may be more expensive up front but dumping the heat in the ground will save so much money and water in the long run. 3 MILLION gallons a day is retarded. Talk about wasteful, especially in a desert area.

Virtual Vegas Machine

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.

Actually yah, it is their property

FTFA:

Page 1: "Legend has it that the company managed to acquire what was once meant to be Enron's broadband trading hub for a song."

Page 3: "Enron had already built a lot of the infrastructure needed for its facility and brought the major carriers on bo