Microsoft Suggests Heating Homes With "Data Furnaces"

Some anonymous masochist submitted a story that makes me cringe from inside a heatwave. "With a temperature of around 40-50C (104-122F), the exhaust from a rack of cloud servers could be a very cost-effective way of heating your house, according to researchers from Microsoft and the University of Virginia. Dubbed the 'Data Furnace,' these racks would be hot enough to completely replace the heating and hot water system in a house or office. Instead of building mega data centers, Data Furnaces would be micro data furnaces in residential areas, providing free heating and ultra-low-latency cloud services to nearby web surfers. Microsoft Research thinks that with remote sensor networks, encryption, and other safety measures, lack of physical security won't be an issue."

Maintenance

[necro81]

And what happens when a drive goes bad at 3 am? I understand these are mostly mirroring content to be closer to the user, so all you'd get is increased latency when the data isn't more closely available, but who is going to want to have some maintenance tech over to their basement a couple times a year to replace a dead hard drive or blade server?

And how do you handle liability? If a pipe bursts and floods the place, who eats the loss for the equipment (or whose insurance company more likely)? What about a break-in?

An alternate approach might be to have a medium-sized data center, where all the hardware is inside a dedicated building and tended to by the usual acolytes, and have the waste heat serve as an input to a heating district of several nearby buildings. Unfortunately, 40-50 C heat is especially low grade from a building systems standpoint, so even this idea may not fly.