Vegas data center bets on 100% uptime

At its SuperNAP data center, co-location provider Switch Communications guarantees 100% availability

A few miles from the glitzy casinos of the Las Vegas strip stands a highly secure, 407,000-square foot building which — according to the man who operates it — is the most energy efficient, high-density data center in the world.

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A few miles from the glitzy casinos of the Las Vegas strip stands a highly secure, 407,000-square foot building which — according to the man who operates it — is the most energy efficient, high-density data center in the world.

Rob Roy, the CEO, founder and chairman of Switch Communications Group, is walking the halls of his seventh and most impressive data center, the SuperNAP, from which he provides co-location services to some of the world's biggest organizations. At 3 p.m., one hour into giving a tour, it's clear that Roy is not a man who easily runs out of energy. (See our related story for more about Roy.)  

"Do we have a time limit?" he asks. "This is my last thing of the day, so I'll just talk till midnight."

The tour ends by 4 p.m., eight hours early, but Roy has plenty of time to explain why the SuperNAP is a safe bet for organizations with the strictest uptime and security requirements. What makes the SuperNAP so interesting? Here are some of the highlights:

Guaranteed 100% uptime

Five nines of availability doesn't impress Roy. "We give 100% service-level agreements, guaranteed," he says. "Obviously, that's a big monetary risk if I didn't feel this design was ready for that. Our NAP 4 facility, which is our next biggest site [and also in Las Vegas], for three years has had 100% uptime."  

Click to see: Power and cooling at the SuperNAP

The SuperNAP (network access point) operates its own 250 megavolts ampere (MVA) substation, 146 MVA of generator capacity and 84 MVA of UPS (uninterruptable power supply), topped off with 30,000 tons of redundant cooling.

"Our network for six years has never had an outage," Roy says. "Every single part of it fails. In any given month, something fails. Blades fail, Cisco routers fail, carriers fail, Sprint fails, Verizon fails, AT&T fails. But we build this stuff in such a redundant manner. The chance of something happening with us where you have an outage is really less than anywhere from a design standpoint."

Militant security

Switch began life in 2000 as a government contractor and has built seven data centers meeting the high levels of security demanded by government and military clients. Military-trained security staff protects the SuperNAP, with at least three guards on site at any given moment.

"By the time you got into this building, you went through our $2 million blast wall, live armed security and six or seven layers," Roy says. "You went through biometrics." Although customer equipment is locked inside cages, Roy says the cages are superfluous. "I really believe at this site we would never have to put a cage on anything because by the time you're here you've been so researched."

Switch has built all seven of its data centers in Vegas because of the region's relative lack of natural disasters. The SuperNAP is six miles from the Vegas airport, far enough to stay out of the path of incoming and outgoing planes, but near enough to be in a designated no-flight zone, guaranteeing that no planes will fly over the data center, according to Roy.