Saturday, July 30, 2011

Server Farm in Siberia

Server farms are hot.  Computer equipment in general is hot so you can imagine having hundreds of big daddy computers all running at the same time.  I've only been in one server farm before and it was way cool (both literally and figuratively).  It takes so much energy to keep a server farm cool so why not use mother nature to a server's advantage.  There are three options here to harness the power of nature's cool.  You could locate a server farm in a place like Siberia or Nunavut.  Then instead of having to cool the air into the server farm you simply blow the Arctic chill in.  The second option is to locate the server farm at high altitude.  I like this option because LA for example has a mountain range just north of the city that reaches heights of 11,000 ft.  At that altitude nightly temperatures reach into the 40's year round.  The third option, and probably the best, is to find a cheap place for electricity and then dig a hole in the ground.  You could build a server farm 10 ft underground and just use a heat exchange system to harness the constant 50 degree temperature at that depth.

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