The Register’s Ashlee Vance wriggles through a Las Vegas Mantrap to get the goods on the SuperNAP, a vast, superpowered data center being constructed in the Nevada desert by a shadowy hosting firm called Switch Communications. Writes Vance:
This 407,000 square foot computing compound will house servers and storage systems owned by many of the world’s most prominent companies. And, unlike most centers of its kind, the SuperNAP will not rely on raised floors or liquid cooling systems to keep the hardware humming. Instead, it will be fueled by custom designs that allow it to maintain an astonishing 1,500 watts per square foot – or close to three times the industry standard.
That’s a lot of juice. In fact, according to one estimate, the SuperNAP will suck up more power than is used by the Bellagio, the Venetian, and Caesar’s Palace combined.
Switch CEO Rob Roy claims the design of the SuperNAP is far more advanced than that of the massive server farms being erected by Google, Microsoft, and other tech leaders. “What we are building has three or four times the power and cooling of the other guys,” he boasts. According to Roy, the company’s investors are urging him to build 10 more SuperNAPs around the world. “Such an undertaking,” writes Vance, “could strap actual muscle to the cloud and utility computing buzzwords that have become commonplace in the technology industry.” It could also tap out a lot of local power grids.
In the meantime, aficionados of data center porn will get a charge out of the SuperNAP video. It’s totally Vegas.
I’m thinking that the power it needs could be enough to power a small country of sorts. Massive. I know it sounds preposterous, but if it is shadowy, you think Switch might actually be government sponsored?
And why build on a really heated place like Nevada (I know they have the power there)? Why not someplace cooler or freezing?
Thanks for the shout out, Nick.
Best.
alain
It might be spook, but its probably commercial.
While Nevada is hot, if you put it in Alaska, the global warming folks would complain. ;-)
More seriously, the power it uses will overwhelm any small difference between the 110 outside there, and the 80 outside in someplace like Washington State. I’m sure the site was picked for the cheap energy, just as the big Google site in The Dalles, Oregon.
why build on a really heated place like Nevada
Removing moisture from circulating air is a bigger challenge that lowering temperature of the circulating air. Low humidity is a big factor in deciding where to put data centers. A/C load will increase significantly as greater moisture needs to be removed from the air that circulates the electronic equipment otherwise moist air will corrode and short the electronic circuitry. AZ and NV has high concentration of data centers.
The big enabler waiting in the wings is a new, streamlined platform and new hardware (new CPU, new memory architecture, the whole nine yards). There are huge power savings to be had there, huge administrative savings, huge HW savings in store. Smart investors should be looking into fabs and real estate, not data centers that will never pay for themselves.
Why? Well, we have naught but precarious stacks, server side. We have poorly re-invented lisp machines, quite inefficient. We have monstrous stacks that, “at the end of the day”, do nothing but run a database and a high level language connected to a network stack. We don’t need virtual memory. Process protection and threading should be handled (and shall be) at the language level. We simply do not need today’s OS’s and there’s even emerging smooth migration paths away from them.
This isn’t that hard to see. Imagine a hypothetical where the only thing that mattered going forward, server-side, was Java. That’s exaggerated but not so far fetched — it’s an idealized form of where we are. Java is tight enough that it doesn’t need VM to run JVM — software can assist there. It’s complete enough that a “Java machine” is, in principle, all anyone needs. Were optimization to seep down to HW, Intel would be facing serious problems because with cheap, older-tech fabs you could make JVM machines that blow doors off of Intel architectures. The only thing missing is a tightening up of the server side which, putting this hypothetical aside, JVM per se is not quite right for.
But, “it” is right out there. It’s in reach. Someone will come up with it. It’s going to be clever lisp machines. My land grab may or may not be pivotal but it sure is in the right ballpark. Current build-outs, with little or no demonstrated payout… well, there’s a lot of bluffing going on around this poker table. I don’t want to know who’s buying what land for data centers. I want to know who’s buying fabs. And I want to know who’s working on feeding those fabs work loads.
-t
Azul systems has been shipping “java appliances” for the last couple years along the lines of thinking in your 3rd paragraph.
I live in Vegas, and work for the electric utility. There’s a huge inaccuracy in that article – power is NOT cheaper in NV. Since the utility cannot produce enough power for the state locally, it must be purchased on the market. $400 electric bills in the summer months (all the A/C) is not uncommon.
I think many people think we have the Hoover Dam right here. Most of that electricity goes to Southern California.
>> It could also tap out a lot of local power
>> grids.
And, of course, if these power grids are the so-called SmartGrids or Intelligrids there is the possibility that the datacenters could be running the controlling software that directs the power consumed by them into themselves. Humm.. why not just build the datacenters INSIDE the power plants and save all that redundancy?
Nick:
>> It’s totally Vegas.
No. It’s totally …. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” – the hiddne chapter! What could Hunter S.Thompson and a Samoan lawyer visiting COMDEX high on LSD could see in a Las Vegas datacenter …..