Enterprise Briefing

 

 

 

When thinking of a secure, mission-critical data center, one of the last images that springs to mind is a floating platform out at sea. Ever the innovator, Google has plans to change that view. It has filed a patent for a 'water-based data center', which is essentially a floating platform carrying a number of modular data center units in shipping containers. Anchored when operational it would use seawater for cooling and wave, tidal and wind action for electricity generation.

 

Google's patent application says that because the data center is on a floating platform it can be easily moved to locations where there is a particular need for computing power. These could include natural disasters, military support, a major event or even simply a location where a data center cannot be built. Although this story has garnered a lot of attention recently, the original US patent application was made in early 2007. While Google's idea seems a gimmick, elements of the floating data center address the industry's concerns around power, cooling and rapid deployment, and some of them are already in use in other forms.

 

 

Take, for example, the floating data center's approach to power. With high-density computing demanding ever-increasing power, many technology users and vendors are looking at renewable energy to cut their reliance on increasingly expensive electricity supplies and slash their carbon footprint. Wave and tidal power may sound far-fetched, but it is already being used in Portugal, the UK and France. In fact, the same Pelamis wave technology that Google suggests in its application is already in operation in the Atlantic off Porto, Portugal (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7632947.stm), and in the Orkney Islands, Scotland.

 

Solar power has already attracted investment from technology vendors including Google with the aim of making the technology efficient enough to to meet data centers' massive power needs. On a smaller scale, Sun powered one of its modular data centers partly with solar arrays at Germany's IT tradeshow CeBIT this year (http://blogs.sun.com/blackbox/entry/sun_as_in_solar_modular ). However, with temperate countries often being windier than sunny, wind power is a better alternative for many, and data centers along with other businesses in Europe and beyond are already tapping its potential by installing their own on-site wind turbines.

 

Securing the supply is only half the answer, says Peter Martin, data center expert at Orange Business Services. "Renewable energy addresses the supply side of data center power, but it is important not to forget the demand side," he points out "It's vital to look at reducing overall power consumption through virtualization and consolidation. This alone can help companies increase their server utilization from perhaps 10% to over 50%, substantially reducing the number of servers required in a data center."

 

 

Cooling is another key data center preoccupation and one that also uses a lot of power. Google's patent suggests using water cooling for its floating data center. This was the dominant approach to cool mainframes in the 1960s. Because water can absorb more heat than air, pumping water round a cooling system to take the heat away from servers is much more efficient than air conditioning.

 

Water cooling is just one possibility to reduce data center dependence on air-conditioning. A more radical solution is Microsoft's experiment of putting servers in a tent (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/09/22/new-from-microsoft-data-centers-in-tents/ ) and relying on natural airflow to keep the servers functioning. Despite the adverse Seattle weather, the servers in the experiment continued to function over several months. Although this is not something that users are likely to consider for mission-critical applications, it certainly does suggest that servers are more robust than claimed.

 

France Telecom is also working on efficient cooling. An award-winning cooling system developed by the Orange Labs network harnesses the colder nighttime air, combined with the building’s thermal inertia, to cool the facilities. In one year of operation, it has managed to reduce energy consumption by a factor of six to seven in 400 of its technical sites, and is applying the innovation together with other techniques to its main data centers.

 

 

In volatile markets, it is vital to be able to bring server capacity online quickly which is why server vendors such as Sun, HP and IBM already supply all-in-one wired and pre-configured data centers in shipping containers. They require minimal maintenance and can be bolted together to create a larger data center as the need arises. These data centers can be built off-site and shipped rapidly to any area that requires computing power, whether on the back of a truck or tethered to an offshore platform in the case of the Google floating data center.

 

The minimal maintenance required for container-based data centers strikes a chord with more mainstream data center practice, says Orange's Martin. "Companies are increasingly adopting 'lights-out' data centers," he explains. "Essentially this means that data centers don't need to have large on-site local staff, because most of the data center management is carried out remotely. This is much more efficient and reduces the labor costs."

 

So while we may not actually end up running a data center in a tent in rainy Washington State or putting it on a platform in stormy seas, these out-of-the-box ideas are vital to test future thinking around robust server design, mobility, renewable energy, modularity, low maintenance design and innovative cooling.