

Utah Data Center - merinid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

======
dsl
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.

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

~~~
dsl
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.

~~~
merinid
You could do something data science-ish and look at how much power Baltimore
Electric is buying in comparison to other companies, whilst controlling with
Census data and perhaps other industrial activity data, see if there is really
a gap in the power they are buying for the type of demand they should getting
in a comparable scenario.

~~~
dsl
I know from personal conversations, but I found a public article citing the
same:
[http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2006-08-06/news/0608060158_...](http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2006-08-06/news/0608060158_1_agency-
power-surges-nsa)

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

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

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

~~~
lucb1e
I figured -- and I also figured why that was. They probably plan on storing a
copy of most of it there... :/

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

~~~
lucb1e
Hahaha, indeed! +1

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

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joonix
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?

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dakrisht
$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
_$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.

~~~
joonix
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).

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jedbrown
_"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.

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

~~~
lucb1e
It would be highly ironic if they encrypt data there.

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madiator
Even if a machine can store 50 TB (say 5TB in subsequent years _10 disks), to
store 1 yottabyte (10^12 TB), you would need 2_ 10^10 machines, or 10 billion
machines. And I can't even start to think of the datacenter network topology..

~~~
epistasis
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...

~~~
iand
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.

~~~
epistasis
At 80 drives in 4U, removing the drives from racks is only going to improve
density by a small percentage. Perhaps by removing any walking space between
the racks you could bring it down to 180 square miles from 360. HDD are more
volumetrically dense than tape.

Any way you look at it, a yottabyte is going to occupy an enormous amount of
physical space.

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

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

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

