NSA Utah Data Center Blueprints Reveal It Holds Less Than Thought 197
cold fjord writes "Break out the tin foil hats, and make them double thick. Forbes reports, 'The NSA will soon cut the ribbon on a facility in Utah ... the center will be up and running by the "end of the fiscal year," ....Brewster Kahle is the engineering genius behind the Internet Archive,... Kahle estimates that a space of that size could hold 10,000 racks of servers .... "So we are talking $1 billion in machines." Kahle estimates each rack would be capable of storing 1.2 petabytes of data. ... all the phone calls made in the U.S. in a year would take up about 272 petabytes, ... If Kahle's estimations and assumptions are correct, the facility could hold up to 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes – ... but is not of the scale previously reported. Previous estimates would allow the data center to easily hold hypothetical 24-hour video and audio recordings of every person in the United States for a full year. The data center's capacity as calculated by Kahle would only allow the NSA to create archives for the 13 million people living in the Los Angeles metro area. Even that reduced number struck Internet infrastructure expert Paul Vixie as high given the space allocated for data in the facility. ... he came up with an estimate of less than 3 exabytes of data capacity for the facility. That would only allow for 24-hour recordings of what every one of Philadelphia's 1.5 million residents was up to for a year. Still, he says that's a lot of data pointing to a 2009 article about Google planning multiple data centers for a single exabyte of info. '" Update: 07/25 16:33 GMT by T : For even more, see this story.
Re:Big disappointment (Score:4, Informative)
After looking through the blueprints I couldn't find anywhere designated for a Stargate [wikipedia.org]. Bummer.
On the bright side, that is one more rumor that can be laid to rest.
tsk tsk everyone knows the stargate is under Cheyenne Mountain, it probably a storage facility for pilfered alien tech
Re:Why 24/7? (Score:3, Informative)
General Cole is quoted as saying (I paraphrase slightly), "To find a needle in a haystack, it takes a very large haystack." And a very big computer, I might add. And that single needle will be next to impossible to understand, drowned out by the noise around it generated by all the surrounding similarly shaped needles that aren't quite as shiny, that *don't* stand out.
The more frightening the headlines about the size in exabites of aggregate data in a data center, the more secure we should feel. Peterson's Law states: the capacity to collect, house, and analyze more and more data will be matched by less and less understanding of, insight into, and usefulness of the data. In other words, the ROI (return-on-investment) is less and less. The problem is twofold: a. anyone who hasn't tried her hand at analyzing a large collection of data thinks that the set must tell us everything we need to know, and b. we do get glimpses of stuff we didn't know before -- or think we didn't know before and couldn't get without the terabytes of data we collected.
Re:Why the geographical comparisons? (Score:2, Informative)
I would think you could get some assistance from one of these resources.
UK: Treatment for Gambling Addiction [castlecraig.co.uk]
UK: Mental health helplines [www.nhs.uk]
US: USA Local Problem Gambling Hotlines [about.com]
US: Mental Health [nih.gov]
CA: Problem Gambling Institute [problemgambling.ca]
CA: Mental Health [hc-sc.gc.ca]
AU: Problem Gambling [problemgambling.gov.au]
AU: Mental Health Services in Australia [aihw.gov.au]
I hope you get well soon.