Description
Switch is a company based in Las Vegas, Nevada, that develops and operates the SUPERNAP data center facilities and provides colocation, telecommunications, cloud services, and content ecosystems.
History
Switch was founded in 2000 by Rob Roy, CEO and the organization's principal inventor and chief engineer. In 2002, Roy purchased a former Enron facility in Nevada in an auction only attended by Roy since Enron's "fiber plans were so secretive that few people even knew about the auction", with the facility which Enron invested millions of dollars into selling for only $930,000. The facility was built in a rundown area of Las Vegas near E Sahara, constructed right over the "backbone" of fiber optic cables providing service to technology companies nationwide, which Enron sought to use as a way to sell bandwidth to Internet service providers like a commodity. Six years later, in 2008, Switch was planning to build its first SUPERNAP facility which would "rival anything being built by the likes of Microsoft and Google" for $350 million, with Roy stating that he could store "four times as much gear as those companies do in his center".
Rob Roy holds 500 patents or patent-pending claims for SUPERNAP designs and engineering that have been Tier IV certified by the Uptime Institute. In 2017, the company announced it would no longer pursue certifications by the Uptime Institute, and instead planned to create a non-profit organization to control and define a new data center standard that uses 30 additional metrics and is called Tier 5 Platinum, and that they have plans to follow the new standards. Switch is a CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) that sells all telecommunications services.
As of July 2015, half of the company's 14 top executives are women. Seventy-percent of the current workforce are veterans.
In 2015, the company became the first data center service in the U.S. to participate in President Barack Obama's American Business Act on Climate Pledge. Switch is currently constructing the first of two solar farms, which will provide renewable energy to its data centers. As of January 1, 2016 all Switch data centers are powered exclusively by clean and renewable energy. In 2016 Switch joined the WWF/WRI Renewable Buyers’ Principles.
In its 2017 report on the energy footprint of the IT sector, Greenpeace recognized Switch for the company's use of renewable energy in its data centers. In 2020, construction started on a 555 MW solar project in Nevada, of which 127 MW is behind-the-meter at Citadel.
