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What you are asking for is essentially the open compute design.
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/05/open-compute-ups-power-supply/
http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Open_Rack/SpecsAndDesigns

The standard setup is three power supplies in each rack (they are shifting to two with v2) supplying DC power to each server. With one UPS rack supplying DC power to six server racks. No inverter in sight.

Also, Google used to run 12V batteries in every server but more recent designs haven't been publicly released.

The problem with Greenpeace is that it doesn't always lie.

It was quite right regarding the whales, and has been quite succesful as a result.

Obviously on nuclear it's almost entirely wrong though.

But I disagree that we should stop listening to them because a) it means there's a counterbalance to the massive fossil fuel lobby that due to their past successes, people listen to, and b) I don't think most companies are doing nearly enough, most carbon neutral schemes are actually complete bollocks and don't actually result in a reasonable amount of carbon neutrality, and do we even definitely know that Greenpeace did lie in this case? or are we supposedly meant to trust Apple (whose now deceased CEO was famous for outright lying to the world)?

Look at jo_ham's retarded post below in the discussion "Apple put out a press release gently correcting them", oh well, if Apple put out a press release then obviously it's true. If you read TFA then Greenpeace made an estime of 100 MW sure, but even Amazon queried their 20 MW value and believed it would be at least 78 MW - I fail to believe someone with as much data centre experience with Amazon would come up with an estimate 4x too high.

Still, fanboys will believe what fanboys believe - Apple releases a press release and it's obviously completely true, and would never be an attempt at saving face.

Really, reading TFA the only evidence that Apple's new datacentre will only use 20 MW is Apple's say so? Sorry, but I'd rather trust Amazon and Greenpeaces's estimate than blindly swallow anything the company at the centre of the criticism has to say. If it was just Apple vs. Greenpeace then sure you'd have two polar opposites, but Amazon is relatively neutral in this because is itself wouldn't want to get tangled up unnecessarily in data centre controversy when it owns so many so that adds sway to Greenpeaces argument somewhat. The Amazon article is far more interesting than the PR piece in the summary:

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/amazon-queries-facebook-apple-sola-69713

Or the original blog:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/03/17/ILoveSolarPowerBut.aspx

171 acres of trees are being cleared for Apple's solar array.

So in this case it seems perhaps the real problem is immediately assuming Greenpeace is lying and Apple is right based on nothing more than an Apple press release.

Server farms? Kind of a bitch without ECC but I guess it works in some cases. Granted, what do I know, maybe they will be slapping ECC support into them.

Why do you believe ARM doesn't support ECC right now?

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/04/29/FacebookFlashcache.aspx Maybe this ask /. article prompted them to release it?

I, too, would love to learn of some low-power fanless ECC-backed small servers. The closest I found was an experimental MV78100 (ARM) based board that serves LinuxArmOrg, which according to a recent blog entry is using ECC RAM.

A later post by the same author points out that Atom just doesn't support ECC at all, making it a poor choice for server applications.

I, too, would love to learn of some low-power fanless ECC-backed small servers. The closest I found was an experimental MV78100 (ARM) based board that serves LinuxArmOrg, which according to a recent blog entry is using ECC RAM.

A later post by the same author points out that Atom just doesn't support ECC at all, making it a poor choice for server applications.

Fair point -- I never thought of that. However, there are some other links to this:

• Inside a Google Data Center, including a video
• Notes from someone who says they were at the conference (also aggregated at the ACM

Maybe this is legit...

Now, if there were pictures of the interior (you know, where the interesting stuff is), I could see wanting to feature it

You did read the article, didn't you?
"For a full pictorial history of the inside of Google's data centers, see James Hamilton's blog (scroll down when you get there for the photos), where James has posted some photos supplied by Google's Jeff Dean."

Even better. Here's a pictorial history of Google's servers (be sure to scroll down).

just stick a boxfan in there.

That's what google does, although, if you look, you can see they use a round fan.

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/content/binary/JeffDean_Google2000.jpg