Sin City Server Farm Keeping the World Safe for Data
source: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/st_robroy
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Rob Roy's Las Vegas outpost may remind you of a mega-casino: It's massive. It's full of blinking lights. And its security guards will get rough if you step out of line. But you won't find dealers shuffling cards here. Instead, this facility shuffles bits—on an unprecedented scale.
Dubbed SuperNAP, it's the world's densest data center. In the desert, far from any possible power-cutting natural disasters, Roy, CEO of Switch Communications Group (and no relation to the Scottish vigilante), built a server farm the size of 11 football fields. It eats 1,500 watts per square foot—almost eight times the industry standard—and houses more than 7,000 storage cabinets. Its secret? Rather than placing its blade servers on racks and pumping cold air up through raised floors, Switch packs machines inside containers that draw in cool air and shoot hot exhaust out of the building. "We invented a whole new world to get here," Roy says.
Dubbed SuperNAP, it's the world's densest data center. In the desert, far from any possible power-cutting natural disasters, Roy, CEO of Switch Communications Group (and no relation to the Scottish vigilante), built a server farm the size of 11 football fields. It eats 1,500 watts per square foot—almost eight times the industry standard—and houses more than 7,000 storage cabinets. Its secret? Rather than placing its blade servers on racks and pumping cold air up through raised floors, Switch packs machines inside containers that draw in cool air and shoot hot exhaust out of the building. "We invented a whole new world to get here," Roy says.
