Comments on: Move Server Farms to Desert? Data Is Easier to Move Than Power, After All

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By: HydroBob

HydroBob — Wed, 04 May 2011 22:59:38 +0000

Bring them to Grant County in Washington State where we have some of the cleanest and cheapest power in the country from using Hydro Power provided by the Columbia River. Plus you can keep hard working Americans working!

By: The Arcadian

The Arcadian — Sun, 01 May 2011 16:28:37 +0000

This brain trust is solving all the wrong problems, probably because they’ve never had to solve actual problems. Out here in the real world connectivity/latency, reliability/redundancy, and power/cost efficiency are pretty darned important. Indeed, the only reason why green power for servers farms is even in consideration is that actual power costs are such a small factor in the equation.

By: Doug Jones

Doug Jones — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:57:19 +0000

Iceland wins with reliable hydroelectric power and Ghod’s own cooling capacity provided by the same water flow. Next!

By: Foobarista

Foobarista — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 22:26:38 +0000

Not sure if building out in the desert is such a great idea, but the idea of building where you could be very near a power station make sense. Why not have server farms in North Dakota or West Virginia where you can have natural gas or coal station, or if AGW is your pet worry, anywhere near a nuke plant?

This would be a particularly good idea for secondary, disaster-failover data centers that have to be “always on” but don’t need quite as much human babysitting as primaries.

By: Dean

Dean — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:46:59 +0000

I won’t pretend to address the technical aspects, but to answer one commenter, being in the desert doesn’t necessarily mean being in the middle of nowhere. it could be near Vegas, Reno, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Santa Fe…

By: Jimmy Doolittle

Jimmy Doolittle — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:30:48 +0000

@Sounder,

Great Idea.

Google already has a server farm right next to a dam on the Columbia River, at Dallesport. Cheap electricity was exactly the reason.

By: Veronique Greenwood

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:10:20 +0000

@Nathan, @Patrick, latency is def. something to think about. The researchers give the example of non-time sensitive work, like analytics processing, as the ideal use of a system like this.

@kwo, there’s a reason the proposed centers are in Egypt and Australia–they’re on opposite sides of the globe and thus one will be in light while the other’s in shadow. By shifting computation to whichever center currently has power, they hope to address the problem of continuous operation.

By: Austin

Austin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 21:08:56 +0000

Except the wind will not blow at times and the sun will not shine at times due to dust storms and rain.

And most commercial data farms are near their customers because its is LATENCY not bandwidth that is the issue. Undersea cables are few and easily cut as well.

Political risk is a big deal as well. Egypt has a huge political risk.

IMHO data farms in the future will have their own captive supplies like small nukes.

By: kwo

kwo — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 20:19:47 +0000

Is data actually easier to move than power? Planning to pull wire out to the facility? Launch more geosync sats? Install MW repeaters between the site and civilization?

Also, data centers of this scale require steady power. You can’t just turn them off when the sun goes down or the wind stops blowing. Which means you’d either need to store energy, which is currently unfeasible, or pull power lines from the grid to the data center. Which is now more expensive because the data center is out in the middle of nowhere. A nuclear-powered facility wouldn’t have this problem, but would of course present other challenges.