The Yottabyte at Bluffdale

 

 

"Some say it needs a million gallons of water each day just to cool all the equipment..."

Odd title is it not? Most are wondering what in the Sam Hill is a "yottabyte"? I know I was the first time I saw it. First off, what is Bluffdale? I have addressed this before, but it has been over a year. Bluffdale is the site of the new NSA facility in Utah. And it is big. It is a behemoth.

This $1.5B facility contains about 1M square feet of space. It is bigger than huge. It is a 20 building complex that uses more water and electricity than many small towns. And this facility was built here because....I guess we don't know the answer to that one. The NSA complex at Ft. Meade in Maryland is huge in and by itself. So why did we need another facility? Well, according to the government, we needed a place where we could store a yottabyte of information.

Okay, so now we are back to the yottabyte. This would be a good question for a game show. I dare few if any would know the answer. So spoiler alert - here is the answer. One yottabyte is one thousand trillion gigabytes of data. That is a whole lot of chess! All the information contained in the Library of Congress would take somewhere between 200 and 1,000 Terabytes of storage. As you can see, there is a universe of difference between the 1 Petabyte (1,000) Terabytes to store the Library of Congress and the 1,000,000,000,000,000 gigabytes the NSA would like to house out at Bluffdale.

Okay - I will byte (sorry, just a pun). Why do we need more storage capacity than there is information in the known universe? Just a question. And what are we doing with all this information we are storing? Is this part of our "brave new world"? Where everything about everyone is known to a machine? And who owns this data? The people who paid for this facility? (That be us by the way.) An agency shrouded in mystery from its inception continues to be so in 2015.

I think the next time I run across one of our two Senators, I will ask about this facility. Like why do we need it when we have Ft. Meade? And why do we need to house a Yottabyte of data in Utah? Good questions for us citizens to ask. Especially since we now have the most transparent Administration in American history.