Turn up the heat, crank out the energy

It’s not new news that the growing demands on digital content, especially the web, has had a huge impact on the energy demands of data centers across the globe. Couple this with an elevated need for energy efficiency and the negative stigma placed on carbon emissions and you have companies scrambling to innovate to design and implement more cost effective and environmentally friendly data centers.  According to Read Write Cloud, even Greenpeace is getting into the act, with data centers targeted as the “major cloud computing providers could consume more power than France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. Greenpeace’s report was meant to highlight the carbon footprint of data centers and to urge companies to take measures to move towards more sustainable technologies.”

Everyone from hard drive manufacturers to power and cooling companies are involved in the mix touting developments that create more energy efficient infrastructure. Hard drives inherently are consuming much less power than they did even 5 years ago, and with additional technologies like Seagate’s PowerChoice, and architectures like tiered-storage,  server and storage manufacturers can tell a drive when to slow down, when to speed up, and design systems that accommodate data based on usage demands. There are numerous innovations in the power and cooling sector as well.

All of this is good stuff, but perhaps the real innovation comes from not only reducing power consumption, but leveraging it.  Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge talked to one company (Applied Methodologies Inc) that plans to do just that.  As data centers turn up the heat, Applied Methodologies cranks out the energy. Take the excess heat generated from data centers and turn it into energy, or better yet reuse it in other forms. It’s called thermoelectric technology, Check it out.

I think this is fresh thinking.  It’s not always about reduction.  After all, aren’t there three Rs:  reduce, reuse, recycle?

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2010-08-18T10:22:46+00:00

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