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Google floats a green idea
Most headlines involving Google seem to involve “world domination”, and yesterday’s article from The Times online stuck to the theme, as it reports that Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own “computer navy”.
In fact, Google has applied some lateral thinking to the problem of how to power its energy-hungry data centres. It’s latest idea is to create floating data centres located up to 7 miles (11 km) from shore, in 50 to 70 m of water. If perfected, this approach could be used to build 40 mW data centres powered and cooled by the ocean.
Rich Miller at datacentreknowledge has all the detail on Google’s data centre barges. He also has analysis and a presentation by Google’s “green energy czar” on the company’s take on renewable energy. Clearly the company is quite serious, although some bloggers aren’t so sure.
One thing that doesn’t appear to be mentioned anywhere, however, is connectivity. Presumably the data centre still needs to be connected by fibre-optic cable. So what happens if the barge needs to move, perhaps to avoid a storm, or for maintenance in harbour. Will it be forced off-line?
Fibre maker Draka announced earlier this year that it had developed a robust kind of fibre-optic connector for connecting house-boats to Amsterdam’s fibre-to-the-home network. But I imagine that a data centre would need something an order of magnitude or several more reliable. There’s a challenge for the cable and connectivity guys!
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