One of the most important things in maintaining healthy servers is keeping them cool: a unit that frequently overheats is not only at risk of breaking down but is also highly inefficient in terms of energy consumption. But masses of rack servers require expensive and often pollutive electrical and chemical cooling systems in order to stay operative.
This is why companies that need massive servers to store the information that their high volume of traffic demands are coming up with novel ideas to keep the temperature levels of their huge operating systems sufficiently low for optimum operation, having the added bonus of reducing their electricity usage and therefore carbon consumption and energy bills.
Facebook recently moved a large portion of their storage server units to Lulea in Swedish Lapland, where they can make use of the cold ambient temperatures to keep cool their massive number of servers (estimated to be in excess of the equivalent of eleven football pitches in size). It’s thought this move could reduce the generator power their server networks use by up to 70%.
Elsewhere, Google have patented the concept of a ‘water-based data centre’ as a way of storing their storage server units. This would involve floating them on ‘barges’ seven miles offshore, making use of wave power as a renewable energy source. The commodity of seawater also gives them the capacity to use its low temperature to cool their farm of servers. If the centre can be entirely self-sufficient in terms of energy consumption, as is their aim, a significant proportion of Google’s overheads (it is claimed that a single Google search uses as much as half the amount of energy it takes to boil a kettle, with around 34,000 searches every second) would be massively reduced.
Though they might seem novel, these attempts make better business sense than warehouses full of rack servers leaking heat and eating into company profits.
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