Preamble: I am not a Data Scientist, or a Computer
Expert, or a Data Security Expert. I’m just
a small-town accountant with an interest in computers. I also read a lot. My goal in this blog is to codify my
readings regarding current events, to begin a conversation regarding our expectations of privacy and 4th Amendment rights, and to provide you with links to the sources used, so that you can
judge the source’s credibility for yourself.
Part 1
This month, the new NSA Utah Data Center comes on line. The NSA has other facilities, including a 28
acre site near Baltimore. But the Utah
facility is remarkable, even by Google or Apple standards.
The $2B Utah facility includes 1 million square feet of
space, with 100,000 square feet (officially, possibly more) dedicated to a
server farm. The Data Center will be almost entirely
self-sufficient. Security is state of
the art, and includes a fence capable of stopping a 15,000 pound vehicle
traveling at 50 mph.
Even more impressive is the computer capacity of the data
center. Computers consume power and
generate heat. 100,000 square feet of
rack-mounted computers consume lots of power, and generate lots of heat. This Data Center will have its own electrical
generator, producing 65 Mw of power. To
put that in perspective, the average home consumes about 1kWh of power. So, a 65 Mw generator is capable of powering
65,000 houses. The
Data Center will consume 1.5 million gallons of water daily for cooling. The NSA’s own description is here …
A March 2012 article in Wired speculated that the data
storage capacity would be on the order of yottabytes (one yottabyte = one
trillion terabytes), a capacity so large it is almost unimaginable.
However, more recent estimates put capacity in the range of
3-12 exabytes. That’s still a lot of
storage, equivalent to 24hr video and audio records of every person in the US
for one year. That estimate is also more
in line with space and power specifications of the Utah facility.
So, what is the NSA going to do with all of those
computers? And why should I care?
Stay tuned for Part 2.
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