About that new shiny datacenter
NSA's new datacenter is having some glitches. From
Business Insider:
The NSA's Huge New Data Center Keeps Having Meltdowns And No One Knows Why
The National Security Agency's new $2 billion Utah data center keeps suffering from costly meltdowns and government officials are not sure of the cause, Siobhan Gorman of The Wall Street Journal reports.
Since August 2012, there have been 10 electrical surges that have prevented the NSA from using computers. One official described them as "a flash of lightning inside a 2-foot box."
Each meltdown caused as much as $100,000 in damage. The center requires about 65 megawatts of electricity to run, at a cost of more than $1 million a month, and the surges are probably connected to the electrical system's inability to simultaneously run computers and keep them cool.
Ouch -- cooling is a Very Big Deal.
When I was working for Microsoft, the last lab I managed had over 1,200 computers. It was used for dynamic load testing of large server systems. We could simulate tens of thousands of simultaneous people trying to place orders at Barnes and Noble for example. A lot of fun! The room had a custom dedicated cooling system and it failed on a regular basis. Once it failed, the temperature of the room would rise to over 90�F inside of ten minutes. Machines started to die soon after.
Posted by DaveH at October 8, 2013 9:02 PM