Data Center 100211

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Feb 15 2010) Construction , Carbon Footprint

1. 

   ... How about data centres in space?

   Doug Mohney wrote here about climate matching - the practice of building a data center in a cool environment to match the cooling needs of the servers it contains. So far we've heard that data centers in colder countries like Ireland, Finland or Iceland can be run with less expensive cooling. But how far could this be taken? It sounds like a UK think tank, Intellect is taking it to extremes. 

   An Intellect group, Space IGT, has been considering the business - and environmental - benefits of space, and come up with suggestions to make and save money by doing things off-planet that can be done better there. They think there's a £40 billion a year industry for the UK to in space by 2030, with 100,000 jobs - and they want £550 million a year in government funding to build it. 

   Their ideas include some good and well-known ones, such as using satellites to deliver broadband to areas where coverage is difficult. That's been done for some time, and the obvious drawback, the poor uplink, is well known. 

   But they also seem to be floating the suggestion, reported here - of "data centres" in space? 

   The idea might just be a flight of fancy or a slip of the tongue, but there it is in Space IGT's  press release, popped into a paragraph along with the rural broadband idea, and the promise that these space data centers could save the UK around 40m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. 

   So how about it? 

   I guess "free vacuum" cooling would be a step beyond free air cooling, and there really would be no need for any air conditioning. I suppose it might be tricky to source data center equipment that is rated to run in that environment, and it would have to be sheltered from temperature extremes. Still there should be no problem in gathering solar power to run the thing. 

   I don't know how many tonnes of CO2 it would take to put the data centres up there in the first place, and how many to keep them up there. Truck rolls for maintenance would turn out to be expensive rocket-assisted visits. That, and the constant upgrades that equipment makers like to insist on, would require a steady stream of outer-space engineers to service the thing. 

   All that would definitely be a drawback. However, operating a data centre that remote might actually cause people to think again about any needless tinkering, and might persuade them to make sure their remote management really does work. In that sense it could be a good idea. 

   But green data center pioneers on earth are working hard to get better at using their "waste" heat productively - by heating water and local houses, as for instance in the Etix DataCenter in Paris. So the time might come when that heat is so useful it seems a very silly idea to put the data center anywhere remote - let alone in space - and just venting it to the environment.  

   
   In the end, though, a data center in space would at least give experts a good answer to anyone who tells them that this sort of thing "isn't rocket science". 
   
   
   

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