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Germans Can Get Free Heating From the Cloud
judgecorp writes The idea of re-using waste server heat is not new, but German firm Cloud&Heat seems to have developed it further than most. For a flat installation fee, the company will install a rack of servers in your office, with its own power and Internet connection. Cloud&Heat then pays the bills and you get the heat. As well as Heat customers, the firm wants Cloud customers, who can buy a standard OpenStack-based cloud compute and storage service on the web. The company guarantees that data is encrypted and held within Germany — at any one of its Heat customers' premises. In principle, it's a way to build a data center with no real estate, by turning its waste heat into an asset. A similar deal is promised by French firm Qarnot.
.. but in the summer?
Works well until someone shows up a the door of a 3rd party business with a warrant and all the business servers and laptops are seized because a judge think he knows technology because he owns a IPAD and was the first on his block with a PalmPilot.
WTF, they may not be such a bad thing after all... Let's have a flame war on a cold winter night.
But security, reliability, and other factors seem to defeat any advantages. I wonder who their customers will be.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I don't know jack about their actual achitechture but, if they do it right, then the loss of any one group of nodes wont matter.
If that is the case, then this actually makes them highly resiliant to this problem. Lets say to actually shut them down meaningfully means shutting down 20 households. That is 20 warrants, at 20 properties, probably some number of jurisdictions, its a lot more work....and basically, wont happen accidentally because someone was an idiot.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
After outsourcing their heating, they can double down and outsource their IT to the cloud, which will run on their on-premises servers.
All of the costs, none of the advantages, but an MBA feels real smart, which really brings a smile to everyone's faces.
God I love the cloud to butt plugin, it never fails to amuse.
Where do I sign up!?
More like, when will it be available in canada!?
Wolke Hitze
I remember an internal communication bulletin which touted how the new server farm wasted less energy for climatisation.
The explanation was something like 'as we are in a country not very hot, we often just have to pump ambiant air rather than running the climatisers.'
What happens when the rack gets upgraded and produces less heat? Does not sound like a long term solution for the consumer; or at least incentives choosing inefficient hardware.
Because in the summer, you know, I kind of don't need the cooling expenses.
The problem is more that someone may show up in their office (the ones that "rent out" the space to the cloud company), suddenly that cloud server you rented is gone and now try to prove that it's your data and that you have actually nothing to do with the company they raided.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So you've got servers hosting potentially sensitive data. Ordinarily, physical access to these boxes would be restricted to the people with data center access. Now will it be RANDOM_OFFICE_WORKER in RANDOM_COMPANY? Sure, you might have the servers password protected, but physical access to the boxes trumps nearly any other kind of security. This sounds to me like it is just a matter of time before some kind of massive data leak occurs thanks to hosting the servers outside of a secured data center.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The article doesn't mention anything about access to the internet, so I take it true high-speed symmetric internet connections are available pretty universally in Germany.
So if I have a server sitting in my home and a line to it, what is to stop me from plugging into it?
A clever admin turns this into a feature. Simply stripe all user data over all servers. Now the cops have to conduct simultaneous raids at 6000 different premises, each owned by a different legal entity, otherwise whatever they get is completely useless.
If it's a proper cloud system the loss of any one node is pretty much expected to be a regular occurrence and automatically compensated for. That's why it's 'cloud', IE you don't care where the servers are, and no accident in any one area of the world should shut you down.
Besides confiscation by government officials you also have backhoes through the fiber, power losses, building accidents/flooding, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
I think most are getting the GP's point.
Most warrants will be all computers at a given location/office. So you are company A, who decided to allow Cloud&Heat to put a rack in, someone using that rack does something "naughty", and now the police want to take all of Company A's computers/servers as well. Now I don't know how that would play out in Germany, but could see it happening in other countries.
I think the issue is the 'host' company renting space to the 'cloud' will get swept up and lose their own equipment also. Might not happen in Germany, but in the US it is a distinct probability.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That was the GP's concern, Opportunist flipped it and I responded to that.
The police showing up and taking ALL the IT equipment when they only need the servers is not that likely of a problem even in the USA. Such a confiscation would require reaching though multiple jurisdictions, at which point an office with a clue is likely to get involved and realize that seizing the servers of a reasonably legit cloud company is more than a pain in the butt than working with them to pull what really matters out - the data.
I don't read AC A human right
I'd want to know more about the noise levels produced before I signed up.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Depending on the layout, you may not even know it's there. It's in it's own locked cabinet and nobody uses it, they may just call it the heater and it could be missed.
XDInd
Except it's cloud computing, so you probably aren't using one rack, but processing across multiple racks. It would probably require multiple subpeonas to complete, with the first one to determine which ones were involved, and then another to determine where the servers are actually installed, and then a third to obtain those specific servers. By the time it's gets to that point, I would hope that someone figures it out correctly.
XDInd
Such a confiscation would require reaching though multiple jurisdictions...
One of the things the last 15 years should have taught us is to never trust the authorities to follow the 'law'. They can make it up as they go along. Many of these raids are just plain punitive shakedowns in nature, like a mobster breaking your kneecaps or kidnapping the wife and kids. Oh, you may be found 'innocent' in the end, but just try to get your time and money back.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
But in the end you wont be happy when they come knocking at your door because they want to have the hardware.
Or when the company says "everything that could happen is ofcourse the fault of the homeowner because you know"
The bigger problem is for the companies renting out the premises. If a judge gives an order to seize the cloud server at a particular address and the police use it to seize every computer at that address, a firm's business may come crashing down all because they were trying to save some heating bills. Lots of non tech companies use Computers in their day ago day work , they may even have an in house email server but no outside facing servers but still get caught in a dragnet over something hosted on the cloud.
If you live in a small space, maybe bitcoin mining could be a little closer to profitability if it heats your space.
That is so practical. You are a genius. Everyone is doing this now. That's why there are no more raid. Dipshit.
Not having the password of any user accounts on the server, perhaps?
What's your major malfunction?
I had a similar idea back when some bright spark decided a 40 foot container would make a great module for a closed server stack (2006?). The question was: "What to do with all that waste heat?" The answer: "pump it into a building which lets you park one of these crates in their parking lot."
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Your IQ doesn't quite reach triple digits even with padding, does it?
That's what a mobster breaking some kneecaps and kidnapping wife and kids of crooked assholes is for.
Just 'cause you don't get satisfaction by the law doesn't mean you can't get satisfaction against the law. Provided you have the money, that is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
maybe not in the RTFA, however, from the vendors site:
"12,000 EUR upfront payment required.." ..apart from that, they are skimpy on details, as to how many Kw (or proper equivalent, not a heating egineer) the server rack would output. There is no way, spare heat from one server rack operation would be anywhere near enough to heat the type of (mostly industrial) property they are aiming at, (requires 3-phase power, seperate metering, etc.).
Basically, if it sounds too good to be true.. anyone wanna pay me 12,000 though? - I'll stick a pile of noisy electronic junk in your living room, no bother - 24/7/365 usage rights in my favour a must, of course.
IIRC, the four most expensive states for electricity in the U.S. are Hawaii, Alaska, New York, and Connecticut. I live in the latter, and pay 22 cents per kWh, though I chose a slightly more expensive option - I could get it for 21 cents / kWh.
I moved from Virginia, which matches the national average of 12 cents per kWh, and it was built into my rent. Since moving I'm dramatically reduced usage - down to less than 200 kWh per month for a two-person household. All the low-hanging fruit is taken, though - not sure what I'd cut if rates were double.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
So it's really cheaper to keep hundreds/thousands of machines all over creation to run and maintain than in a centralized building? I'm not sure I buy the longer term savings.
There is no way that the amount of heat that puts out it worth the amount of real-estate it takes up, and forget about the liability. And I am assuming that they pay for the extra air cooling in the Summer.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Alaska here. A touch over 20 cents/kwh.
As for cutting electricity usage on the extreme end:
Insulate house more. Replace windows
Replace Refrigerator with new energy star unit, even if the old one was ES too, standards have improved tremendously. Get one of the ones with the freezer on the bottom - they're the most efficient.
Switch to line drying, or get a dehumidifier type dryer.
I know we're slashdotters, but turn off the computer if you're not on it. Install an energy efficient micro-server for the torrents, webserver and such.
Audit your lights - can you get away with 800 lumens where you currently have 1200?
Bake more instead of frying. Turn off the oven in the last few minutes.
I don't read AC A human right
+2 on the microservers - I thought of repurposing a Phenom quad-core or worse a Pentium 4 as a file/web/torrent/IRC server. Then I realized I could take a 6-year-old Atom N270-based netbook and use that instead, CPU power is about the same as the P4, but way better specs on everything else. And that turns out to be more than enough. It's ran both Windows Server 2003 and Debian Wheezy (XFCE) comfortably. It uses about 10 watts and comes with an uninterruptable power supply built in. Portable web browsing has become green headless server. No Pi needed. And I haven't even replaced the 5200k laptop drive with SSD. Additional cost in this scenario was $0. I imagine if you have a usage scenario that needs more CPU power, you can get something even more efficient now in the $100 range.
I'm an apartment dweller, so many of the home upgrades aren't possible for me, though when I do buy appliances, energy efficiency is a top concern (recently got a front-loading washer). Line-drying was a no-brainer - why pay when the sun and air will do it for free :-)
Just replaced an energy-hogging server with a low-power version (about 30 watts with little load, 45 with heavy load). It's normally on S3 suspend, and I use WOL to wake it whenever I need it, including remotely (it also wakes itself twice daily, once to do a backup, and once to update a household energy usage chart online).
Bake more instead of frying. Turn off the oven in the last few minutes.
Now that one surprises me. I do have an electric range/oven, and I would have thought that pan-frying would use less electricity than baking - especially since I'm usually baking for at least 30 minutes, whereas cooking in a pan can often be done in 20 minutes or less. I get that the heat is well-retained in the oven whereas a lot is lost on the range, but I don't have a way to actually measure the stove's usage. I do generally put baked items in before the oven's preheated and turn off the oven before the time has elapsed, except when I'm doing breads.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Bake more instead of frying.
How does that decrease electricity use? In the best case (gas oven) it remains the same, but most households have an electric oven, so they will just be replacing natural gas by electricity as a heat source.
I wouldn't know about the whole of Germany - I expect this offer to be available only where high-speed networking is available. I.e. in cities.
The problem is more that someone may show up in their office (the ones that "rent out" the space to the cloud company), suddenly that cloud server you rented is gone and now try to prove that it's your data and that you have actually nothing to do with the company they raided.
Easy. If you rented it out, there will be a contract. You put the servers behind a locked door with the name of the cloud company on it. Now that room is legally not part of the premises being searched. A policeman with a warrant for the host company's office can no more go in there than he can go into an office down the hall from the one being searched.
It would be different if they just put their servers in a rack in the host company's server room. They would quite likely would get swept up in a general seizer of the host company's servers.
Nobody's mentioned the first tenant of information security (i.e. physical security) yet? Wow. There's no way I'd want any of my data sitting on a server in some random person's office building. Also, what about redundancy and bandwidth? This just seems like a really horrible idea from so many different angles.
Now that one surprises me. I do have an electric range/oven, and I would have thought that pan-frying would use less electricity than baking - especially since I'm usually baking for at least 30 minutes, whereas cooking in a pan can often be done in 20 minutes or less.
It's two factors: Frying is normally done at higher temperatures than baking, which is why it's faster, but you're also tossing a LOT of heat into the air, which is part of why you normally have a ventilation fan on while you're doing it. The second is indeed that a oven is normally very good at heat retention, reducing power usage.
Boiling pasta is actually one of the worst things you can do in a standard kitchen as far as energy efficiency goes.
I don't read AC A human right
The ol' chestnut of "if I have physical access to the device" still applies. ;)
Whenever I need to boil something, I typically boil the water first in an electric kettle, then pour it into a pot on the stove. I'm also a big fan of the pressure cooker.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Sony and Microsoft have been selling locked-down x86 PCs for use in homes for about a year now. Despite millions of people having physical access, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One video game consoles haven't yet been opened up to mass copyright infringement and cheating in a way that the major news media have seen. Therefore, it's possible to usefully lock down a server against people with physical access. This goes double if the business that installs Heat signs a contract with severe penalties if a server gets physically hacked.
You probably live in Europe then... 240V to every outlet can be handy sometimes. Though a properly insulated kettle would be interesting.
Though I wonder how that compares efficiency wise with my covering the pot when warming it up and using an induction burner. Or the insulated crock pot, for that matter.
A pressure cooker can do all sorts of amazing things, but there's a reason I said boiling pasta, it's my understanding that you use a pressure cooker to avoid boiling things. ;)
I don't read AC A human right