The NSAs Top Secret Utah Data Center
According to Wired, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (10 24 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes, or a million exabytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.
(Wired)
To do this, NSA (which is commonly known as “No Such Agency”) is building its top secret Utah Data Center, near Bluffdale, Utah. At a million square feet, this $2 billion digital storage facility outside Salt Lake City will be the centerpiece of the NSA’s cloud-based data strategy and essential in its plans for decrypting previously uncrackable documents. Its also survivable, stand alone, and a key continuity asset.