Companies like Google, Yahoo, Verizon, Apple and countless others have massive data centers scattered around the globe. There are reports of new data center installations in the southern United States, and I find the idea just crazy. It’s bad enough that data centers exist in Silicon Valley.
Buffalo, NY is becoming a hotspot of data center construction. Why Northern New York State? The bitter cold winters and moderate summers provide limitless cubic feet of chilly air. A principle concern in constructing any facility housing tens of hundreds of thousands of heat-producing massively-powerful computers and storage devices is temperature control.
Small Dog installed a Freeaire system in our own server room which, at the time, housed about a dozen Xserve G5s and several Xserve RAIDs—not to mention Power Macs, Mac Pros, and networking gear. Its simplicity is staggering: bring in cold air to cool your server room. In our small server room, we achieved savings of almost $2,000 annually. Imagine the savings on something 100 or even 1,000 times the size.
This system is not perfect: cold, moist air can condense inside, but the system is perfectly scalable with dehumidification. I’d really love to see data centers move northward to take advantage of this limitless, free, renewable resource. Cheers to Yahoo for making this move!