Nuke Site Converted Into Green Data Center 125
1sockchuck writes "If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former nuclear fuel facility? One of the world's largest web hosts, 1&1 Internet, is building a new data center on a site in Hanau, Germany previously used by Siemens to produce mixed oxide rods made from enriched uranium and plutonium. The site has been cleaned up, and 1&1 is converting it into a 'green' data center powered by renewable energy and using free cooling to save on air conditioning costs."
1&1 (Score:5, Insightful)
1&1? They should worry more about where they site their customer service! I was with them for a while and when they screwed up my billing it took a long, long time to untangle the mess. Mainly because the different departments were all sited in different places and none had the authority to do what needed to be done to sort it out. 1&1 - hateful, money-grubbing company. Thank you, rant over. I will now pay the karma hit with pleasure.
So what? Why is this a front page story? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a former nuke producing facility.
It's green.
Is there anything to see here?
Re:1&1 (Score:2, Insightful)
Mainly because the different departments were all sited in different places and none had the authority to do what needed to be done to sort it out.
I always thought this was standard among all customer service departments.
Re:"Free" Cooling very economical (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends on your needs. If you have a big company, with tons of servers working in a distributed cluster, then one server can completely fail without having any hit on the performance of the services. And as failures are exceptional cases, those big companies prefer to have failures in some specific components/machines than to have to pay a far higher energy bill.
But if you have the "traditional setup", with tons of machines, each of them responsible for a specific system/application, then of course: if anything in one machine fails, that machine (and everything running on it) will break.
Re:"Free" Cooling very economical (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever actually looked at the FULL cost of proper cooling? Not just the AC units, but the power draw, the labor to keep the parts running, and filters clean, the HUGE generators to keep these large AC systems running when the power goes out? More than half of most datacenters generators and UPS load is for cooling. You can buy a ton of hard drives for the cost of a 1MW diesel generator.
If it was a nuclear facility... (Score:3, Insightful)
...then it was already green. [blogspot.com]