Utah Data Center

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

by merinid • 13 years ago

161 33 13 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

vyrotek• 13 years ago

On a related note. The Utah Libertas Institute says they'll be interviewing William Binney a whistleblower who worked for the NSA.

"Tomorrow we'll also be interviewing William Binney, the whistleblower who worked at the NSA for over 30 years and quit after they started targeting innocent Americans. He has some fascinating insight on exactly what the agency does, and with the data center being built in Utah, has a message to deliver to us.

What questions would you like us to ask him?"

https://www.facebook.com/libertasutah/posts/584519078248420

andyhmltn• 13 years ago

I've listed to William Binney a few months back on the Joe Rogan Experience talking about this. Very interesting.

dsl3• 13 years ago

Bumblehive (the Utah datacenter) is just one of many massive infrastructure investment programs NSA is working on. Fort Meade and San Antonio are already online at a similar scale to Utah, with another facility in Maryland breaking ground.

The NSA is Baltimore Gas & Electric's biggest customer, even before the expansion.

merinid2• 13 years ago

Really? We would see that data in FERC http://www.ferc.gov/docs-filing/eqr.asp#.UbFZk_ZATns

dsl3• 13 years ago

Feel free to start digging, but from a quick glance your link seems to apply to wholesale rates between power companies. I really doubt commercial customer data is reported.

rpgmaker• 13 years ago

This is probably more informative on the matter: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

jedbrown• 13 years ago

"designed to be a primary storage resource capable of storing data on the scale of yottabytes"

That's more than 1000x the total annual internet traffic. With a budget of a few billion USD, a yottabyte is several orders of magnitude beyond current market rates.

johansch2• 13 years ago

Yes, but you can still get a lot of storage for that kind of money.

2 billion USD in hard drives = 10 million 4 TB drives = 40 Exabytes = 6 GB per person in the world

phy6• 13 years ago

Might as well just manufacture your own hard drives if you want to play this game. Optimized for Accumulo, with built in hardware encryption.

dakrisht2• 13 years ago

What makes you guys think they're paying the same price we are for hard drives??

These datacenters are so sophisticated, they are generations beyond the commercial facilities of today. You can imagine the new facility being built will be the cutting-edge, processors and systems years away from commercial use.

dzaman• 13 years ago

They don't need to have all of the hardware for v1.

madiator• 13 years ago

Even if a machine can store 50 TB (say 5TB in subsequent years10 disks), to store 1 yottabyte (10^12 TB), you would need 210^10 machines, or 10 billion machines. And I can't even start to think of the datacenter network topology..

epistasis2• 13 years ago

What do you mean by "machine"? Your point is well taken, however. You can fit 80 3.5" drives in a commodity 4U enclosure, say 3.2 PB raw per rack with 4TB hard drives and only two head nodes. Then we only need a mere 312,000,000 racks to get to a yottabyte. At 30 square feet per rack, that's 10 billion square feet, or 360 square miles. So. I think the 'yotta' is either anticipating a massive improvement in storage density, or the Wikipedia editor was a bit off...

MrDOS2• 13 years ago

At 30 square feet per rack, that's 10 billion square feet, or 360 square miles.

...with no redundancy whatsoever, and that's raw capacity, not usable. Crazy talk.

iand• 13 years ago

The goal may not to make it all accessible simultaneously. They may archive to disk then remove the disks when they are full and put in storage.

rosser• 13 years ago

For a sense of scale, when this facility was designed, it was planned to hold more storage than existed on the entire planet.

lucb1e3• 13 years ago

I figured -- and I also figured why that was. They probably plan on storing a copy of most of it there... :/

MrDOS2• 13 years ago

I bet they're not even going to seed back. Bastards.

dakrisht2• 13 years ago

$2B build + $2B in hardware - that we know about. Probably much more going into this project. These data centers are probably true works of art inside and out. From a technical standpoint, the NSA has some of the most advanced technologies available today. Most aren't even available to the commercial market; Intel has been making custom silicon for the NSA for a decade. They are on the cutting edge.

taktix• 13 years ago

$2B build + $2B in hardware

Meanwhile entire families are on the streets and there is rampant unemployment. I thought the government was supposed to be for the people, not against them.

joonix2• 13 years ago

And it's not like these investments serve any public good. They don't get commercialized or taught to the public/industry like NASA, DARPA, etc... and what terrorist attacks have they stopped? Kids still shoot up schools. People drive car bombs into Times Square (street vendors stop them). They blow up marathons. They get on planes with bombs in their shoes (passengers stop them, not the NSA).

jathu• 13 years ago

Oh god, that sounds heavenly. I wish they would release some documentation or video of what's inside their data centers. Too bad that would be a national security issue :\

tzury• 13 years ago

Perhaps something similar to this, but in far far larger scale.

http://blog.backblaze.com/category/storage-pod/

noir_lord2• 13 years ago

The bit that really amuses me is that the Americans are going ballistic because their own government is spying on them but as a foreign citizen they think it's perfectly OK for their own government to spy on me.

Sublime.

backprojection• 13 years ago

I don't think our 4th amendment applies to foreigners, does it? I do agree with your sentiment though.

noir_lord2• 13 years ago

Indeed but wouldn't the world be a wonderful place if your constitution did apply (and was followed of course) worldwide.

joonix2• 13 years ago

Who are the people designing NSA software? It seems like this technology should make Google's "big data" techniques seem like amateur hour. Are these guys the cream of the crop or what?

Utah Data Center

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