From the sea to the stars: where to build your next data center

The environmental friendliness and efficiency of a data center is determined not just by what goes in it, but also by where it goes. We've heard a lot about the problem of providing data centers with sufficient cooling and power, filled as they are with increasingly demanding equipment. 

Companies want an ever-higher level of processing capability inside their facilities and that means packing more MIPS per square foot inside server racks, while finding the power to feed them. How have organizations innovated in the placement of their data centers for maximum performance? 


Data centers and swimming pools enjoy an unusual symbiosis: data centers need to get rid of their heat, and swimming pools need to acquire it. So, IBM decided to put the two together, and use the heat from one to warm the other. Working with GIB-Services in Uitikon, near Zurich, the company situated a storage data center near the local public swimming pool, running heat exchange pipes between the two. The data center produces 2800 MW hours of wasted heat each year, which IBM says is enough to provide heating and warm water for 80 houses. Not only does the heat exchange mechanism help to eliminate the data center's cooling problems, but it also saves around 130 tons of carbon emissions. 

Before it was acquired by technology giant HP, services firm EDS built a data center on the coast, next to the UK's North Sea. Located in Wynyard, the data center uses seven-foot fans to blow in cool air from the sea, making use of a concept known as free cooling. The whole of the lower floor of the data center is used as a cooling plenum. 



Google just decided to use the seawater itself, in its Hamina, Finland data center, which was created from a refurbished pulp mill. The facility takes in water from the Baltic Sea, providing the search engine giant with a ready supply of cold water with which to chill its equipment. The same concept, pitched by the country of Mauritius, claimed a 90% saving in air conditioning costs. 


Instead of piping water into the data center, some enterprising firms have considered taking the plunge and putting their data centers in the water - on the sea, to be precise. Google has also patented a water-based data center, which would use water from the sea to cool equipment on a floating data center. The advantage of this approach is that the movement of the water can also be used to provide some of the power used by the data center. 



The Icelandic government, still reeling from its financial meltdown, has been promoting the building of data centers on its island. Its unique mixture of cold temperatures (to reduce air conditioning costs) and geothermal power (to help power the data centers) is proving attractive to many companies, and it has already landed contracts with customers. 


Could space be the final frontier for the data center? Will Whitehorn, who heads up Virgin Galactic, wants to put your servers where no RAID array has been before. "We could put server farms in space very easily," he says. The upside? Space is very cold, so cooling via heat exchangers would be very efficient. 

Solar panels in space could produce vast amounts of power, he adds. Virgin Galactic (among other firms, such as Elon Musk's Space X), are developing systems that abandon conventional cold war-era rocketry in favor of lower-energy systems that Virgin Galactic says can get payloads into space far less expensively. "The Virgin Galactic system will launch small satellites very cheaply," Whitehorn predicted, talking to one of our reporters earlier this year. He has been enthusiastic about this idea for a while, as this report from last year shows. 



Is this possible? There are some problems. Data centers would have to be radiation shielded to avoid them being electronically fried by exposure to the sun, for example. Bandwidth might be an issue, as specialized communications equipment would have to be built, and it could be far more expensive to beam down data than it would be to run it over a ground-based fiber optic link. 



But perhaps the biggest challenge is that people occasionally need to get into these things, and we haven't yet seen anyone grasp the holy grail of a fully lights-out, automated data center. Imagine the job advertisement: "Data center operative needed. Must enjoy travel. Please bring warm clothes." 



A version of this article first appeared in Enterprise Briefing. If you'd like advice on where to site your next data center - whether in conventional or unconventional locations talk to our Professional Services consultants. Visit us at: http://www.orange-business.com/en/mnc2/solutions/professional-services/