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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.
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.
If you come out with a new gen that makes less heat it means it can be more dense so the overall heat per racks stays at least similar (and often goes up). You would need something where the next gen produces less heat but is more sensitive to it to produce an optimal next gen that puts out less heat.
No sir I dont like it.
Server racks have been stable in power usage for quite a while. Generally speaking, if they cut the power consumption per 'X' computational measure(flops, CPUs, memory, etc...) in half they'll simply double the density of that computational measure.
Besides, you're probably looking at a 3-7 year upgrade cycle on these racks. I'm sure they don't want to touch them too often.
I don't read AC A human right
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!”