Over at Wired Magazine, James Bamford looks at the $2 billion datacenter in Utah that the NSA plans to bring online in September.
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.)
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This story was published on Wired.com in March 2012. This means that the NSA’s Utah data center came online last September, not in September 2013 as indicated by your summary.
Other sources indicated that the Utah datacenter comes online this Fall:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/08/behold-the-nsa-s-dark-star-the-utah-data-center.html