Today, tech news community Slashdot brought us a story from the British news site The Register: a company called Switch Communications — which calls itself “The #1 Rated Disaster Avoidance Colocation and Bandwidth Interconnect Facilities in North America” — is building one of the largest data centers in the world. It’s called the SuperNAP. Here’s more coverage from C|Net, Techbays, and Broadband Reports.

If that was “All Geek to you,” collocation is nothing more complicated than putting your computer servers on somebody else’s property. Not only does it ensure that somebody with real tech savvy is there should anything go wrong, but it’s great insurance against natural disasters. Las Vegas doesn’t have a lot of hurricanes (this site is from a guy who rode out Katrina in a collocation center), tornadoes, tsunamis, or things like that. Our flash flooding problem — this fire truck was just minutes from my home and office — has been sharply reduced if not eliminated in all but the most serious of storms by a series of drainage canals under the city (these canals were a critical plot point in at least one episode of CSI). Although Nevada does have some earthquake activity, we have a lot less than California, and most of it is nowhere near Vegas. Knock on wood. NAP is an acronym for Network Access Point; a SuperNAP would be a really, really big Network Access Point!

How big would it be? How about 407,000 square feet with 30 cooling towers and over 7000 server cabinets! Here’s more:

The SuperNAP will cost about $350m, and be about the same size as Google and Microsoft’s $500m data centers. Roy, however, thinks Switch can pack about four times as much computing power in the SuperNAP as these rival centers thanks to the cooling systems and energy supplies.

The irony of putting all this cooling power into a desert area where summer temperatures routinely hit triple digits for weeks on end! Perhaps they will use solar power?

Granted, $350 million is a lot less than the $2.7 billion ($2700 million) it cost to build the Wynn Hotel/Casino, but it will doubtless have a positive impact on our local economy, and put a lot of very smart techie-types to work.