I was invited to visit Switch Communication’s Supernap facility. This must be the best datacentere in the world. It is purpose built, and designed to host new age high density computing. They set out to build a 35Kw/Rack data centre and every decision they took was to enable this goal. There is no compromise. For instance they have invented their air conditioning plant, since, so they claim, the industry leader wasn’t interested in innovating for them, they pump cold air into the top, of the room, and suck the rising hot air out, leveraging the laws of physics. They have three power distribution systems, a fixed floor which supports the PDU system. If you require high density computing, these people are the people to go to.

Watch this video on Youtube, which explains even more.

I found this by querying youtube using the tag supernap.

They talk exclusively about cooling, power, and availability, and they summarise the offering this page. We i.e. Sun are quite good at fitting out data centres, but have rented space in their centre? If you can put up with US jurisdiction, its fantastic. It begs the question why anyone that’s not a specialist would build another. Look at the videos.

This was originally posted at http://blogs.sun.com during Jan 2009 and backdated to the time of occurrence. I transferred the article to this blog in Oct 2014 and kept the original publication date; the Oracle blog article no longer hosted the video. This was part of a series of articles describing my trip to Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference, the rest are available else where on this blog.

The SuperNAP
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