NSA's New $1.5B Data Center: Bonus or Boondoggle?
Let's you and I do a little math about the National Security Agency's planned $1.5 billion data center.
Reading about the National Security Agency’s (NSA's) plan to build a $1.5 billion cyber security data center (Information Week) at the Camp Williams National Guard training base in Utah, I became curious about just how much one could glean about the project from public NSA budget information. Here's what I took away:
At first, this looks like a pretty good deal for Uncle Sam. We seem to be talking about a 1.5 million square foot data center that’s going to cost $1.5 billion, or $1,000 per square foot. That's well below what one would expect to pay for a Tier 3 class data center facility. Or is it?
For me, the math just doesn't add up. According to the budget document, the power density will be "appropriate for current state-of-the-art high-performance computing devices and associated hardware architecture." Yet if you calculate the watts per square foot by dividing the center’s total watts (65MW) by total square feet (1.5 million), you come up with a power density estimate of about 43 watts per square foot. No way that's "state of the art."
So let's say you triple the power density to a relatively modest 130 watts per square foot. That means you could support the center's full load of 65MW in about 500,000 square feet of space. At this power density, you'd probably require another 500,000 square feet for support space (generators, UPS, cooling, etc.). That's 1 million square feet. So what happens with the remaining half million square feet? According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (as reported in the Information Week story) this data center "will eventually employ between 100 and 200 workers." That translates into a whopping 2,500 square feet of office space per employee. Roomy, wouldn't you say?
Now let’s suppose this facility really did support current state-of-the-art power density. That would mean about 400 watts per square foot. Given that density, the total space the data center actually would require would be just 160,000 square feet (i.e. 160,000 square feet x 400 watts per square foot = 64MW). Even assuming the same 500,000 square feet for support, that leaves us with a data center that's 660,000 square feet. Consequently, when you do the math, a 1.5 million square foot facility seems nutty and hard to reconcile with "state-of-the-art" anything. So what's going on?
My guess is that either the NSA has grossly miscalculated their space and power requirements or, perhaps, the true purpose and scale of the facility is a secret. The NSA keeping something secret? That wouldn’t be unheard of, would it?
Just for kicks, I wanted to see how this would compare to Uptime Institute estimates for this type of facility. I assumed 200 watts per square foot and used the Uptime Institute’s guidelines for a Tier 3 data center: $23,000 per KW of load and $300 per square foot. Using this approach, I came curiously close to NSA's $1.5 billion budget number ($1.495 billion, to be precise), and that made me wonder if the data center's budget is being built from the bottom up, or is simply a number tossed out to the public based on Uptime Institute estimates.
One last thought. Do you know how much money it will cost to operate a data center like the proposed Camp Williams facility? Based on a 65MW IT load, a PUE of 1.3 and Utah's cost of $.07 per kilowatt of electricity delivered (a nice rate while it lasts), it will cost $40 million per year simply to pay the electric bill.
But guess what? The reason the electricity is so cheap is
Previous Post: Evaluating Data Center Colocation Options: Expert TipsNext Post: Public Cloud Computing Shows Its Limits
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
