* Photo: Emily Shur * Rob Roy's Las Vegas outpost may remind you of a mega-casino: It's massive. It's full of blinking lights. And its security guards will get rough if you step out of line. But you won't find dealers shuffling cards here. Instead, this facility shuffles bits—on an unprecedented scale.
Dubbed SuperNAP, it's the world's densest data center. In the desert, far from any possible power-cutting natural disasters, Roy, CEO of Switch Communications Group (and no relation to the Scottish vigilante), built a server farm the size of 11 football fields. It eats 1,500 watts per square foot—almost eight times the industry standard—and houses more than 7,000 storage cabinets. Its secret? Rather than placing its blade servers on racks and pumping cold air up through raised floors, Switch packs machines inside containers that draw in cool air and shoot hot exhaust out of the building. "We invented a whole new world to get here," Roy says.
Roy's computer education began at 12. His father, paralyzed in a diving accident, was pursuing a degree in computer science, and Roy volunteered to type his papers and turn the pages of his books. Twenty-seven years later, as more and more petabytes zoom into the data cloud, he sees his facility as home to tech's most creative projects: "We want neat, cutting-edge concepts going on in there—video, gaming, voice."
But Roy tries not to take this stuff too seriously. Consider the comic book he penned about his staff, Switchblades: The Dark Ethereals have hacked into Earth's ionosphere with a plan to destroy the Net! Luckily, Roy, er, Core and his band of super-employees are here to save the day—and keep the world safe for truth, knowledge, and the entrepreneurial way.
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