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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

Then you can have a few ‘thoughts’ on where it should go. You will find the ‘thoughts’ expressed here are as nothing compared to the ‘thoughts’ of a capitalist having many meetings with anxious investors, many meetings with engineers, many quiet sessions with a spreadsheet and many midnight cold sweats lest he impoverish himself, his family and friends.

The vast majority of data is held governments and companies that are beholden to a myriad of security laws and standards. Being brutally honest, most companies won’t let its servers outside of its buildings, and putting them in another country would be unthinkable. Egypt would be referred to as “BFE” in a heartbeat, and the idea would be ridiculed into submission. For instance, the Commonwealth of Virginia not only locates its data inside of Virginia, but its central data facility requires a Federal security clearance to get near its server rooms (which are protected by guards, tank traps, CCTV, and a blackout on Google Earth maps, to name a few).

Second, this idea assumes that WAN links all work all the time. Well, my home office Internet service is supplied by 2 providers now due to outages. Just one WAN outage can cost millions, and it can be caused by a backhoe, a squirrel, or a civil war in Egypt (purely hypothetical examples, ya know).

Third, let me push back on this idea of IT being energy hogs. While what we do consumes electricity, let us acknowledge the ways that we save the environment, starting with the ability to let people telecommute and have video conference.

This idea is a joke. Solar power is pointless for any critical system. By the time you build all the redundant capacity and storage necessary to actually have the kind of 24/7 reliable power you need for a critical system, you’ve spent at least 10 times what a non-solar install would cost. Wind is not much better. Neither make much sense in a true desert where sandstorms blot out the sun, throw grit into gears and polish metal.

I guess this is a mark of a civilization made stupid by material wealth. We are so wealthy and isolated from the practical affairs that we can considered such a resource wasting stunt. Our ancestors would think us mad. Tthe 800 million humans today that live on $2 a day, probably just want to slap us.

Also, there’s no need to worry about people not wanting to move to work in a remote server farm. Prosperity is the biggest draw of all, and tech jobs pay well.

Latency is a killer for the modern internet; its why people put huge tranches of content onto CDNs; to get it network close to the consumer.

Bandwidth on the backbone isn’t infinite. Take traffic which used to be local to Boston and route it instead across the country to Arizona and your backbone traffic goes way up, saturating the fiber.

There’s a class of compute bound problems you could move off to the moon if you wanted to, but for most modern data center “stuff” latency is a serious factor.

Serving data from Europe to a customer in the US can add 100ms or more of time required to get the page to load. If you are talking about an interactive site (Google Docs, gaming site, etc), that would be untenable.

Locating a data center in Australia would add even more latency.

This type of system is used for isolated farms in the prairie states where it is used to provide the sink for a heat pump for both heating and cooling. The cost of drilling the wells can be prohibitive in some area, and very inexpensive in others.

Yes, you can design most electronic equipment to operate at higher temperatures. It will generally reduce reliability and increase failure rates. Fault tolerant systems will prevent the customer from ever seeing the failures, but the decisions will all be driven by the financial assumptions of the bean counters. If there is a belief that ‘green’ offers some tangible benefit it will dominate the choices, regardless of other factors. Politics beats out rationality every time.

As to the cooling issue; I believe that they are now designing systems that don’t need to be 65 to run so proper design and seperation of hot/cool reduce the cooling signifcantly.
BCN

In parts of the Outback of Austrailia lots of people live underground. I read about it in Bill Bryson’s book “In a Sunburned Country”. He didn’t describe the homes as damp.

I like the cold climate idea. Forget solar….use wind turbines. Find someplace with a really high altitude and lots of natural wind conditions.