Recent news about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its questionable data collection practices has gotten a lot of attention this summer. It has also led to a lot of anxiety – so much so that there are some all-out fantasies circulating among conspiratorial theorists.
One of the most recent exaggerations is about the new data center, which is opening in Utah next month. There were claims made that it would hold a yottabyte of data -- that is a whole lot of data. In fact, it is much more data than what would be held in a building which has storage space about the size of a Walmart.
To fit a yottabyte of data, the facility would have so many bytes it would need to be built as big as Rhode Island, according to a recent report on Gizmodo. The price tag (News - Alert), by the way, was estimated at $100 trillion.
That being said, the NSA’s new data center is not going to store a Yottabyte of data. Forbes managed to get a hold of the blueprints for the new NSA data center. The building is now believed to be able to hold about 12 exabytes of data.
The building will be used by the NSA to hold and process some of the data taken from phone companies, Internet companies, satellites, fiber-optic cables and other sources. Forbes estimates there is slightly more than 25,000 square feet for each of four storage areas in the Utah facility. That totals 100,000 square feet, about the size of a Wal-Mart superstore, Forbes reports.
Brewster Kahle, a computer expert who Forbes interviewed, says that amount of space of could hold 10,000 racks of servers. Each rack could store 1.2 petabytes of data. That means the new building could hold 12,000 petabytes, or 12 exabytes of data.
Another expert, Paul Vixie, had a lower estimate: 3 exabytes of data. In addition, William Binney, an ex-NSA employee, said 5 zettabyte of data would be held, NPR (News - Alert) reports. It would use some tech provided by Cleversafe. But Forbes claims he misunderstood some of Cleversafe’s public documents.
In addition, when it comes to storage capacity Moore’s Law would suggest storage capacity in the data center will increase exponentially in coming years, news reports said. In total, the Utah Data Center is about 1 million square feet. It cost about $1.5 billion to build.
And what do people who live in Utah think about the new data center opening in their state? A new survey by the Libertas Institute showed that 54 percent of those questioned strongly or somewhat support the NSA's new Utah Data Center. In contrast, 33 percent opposed the new data center located near the Utah National Guard camp known as Camp Williams.
Located in Bluffdale, it should be operating in September or October. It will join five other major U.S. data centers operated by the NSA.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey