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.

Comments

Great in the winter ..

[ottawanker]

.. but in the summer?

Re:Great in the winter ..

[Translation Error]

From the article:

And the unit is also arranged to vent excess heat outside in summer when no heating is required.

Re:Great in the winter ..

[kuldan]

No, to put it into perspective, power in Germany costs about double than in the US - I pay around 0.30€/0.40$ for power per kw/h in Germany, and I'm with the cheapest provider for the whole region...

Re:Great in the winter ..

[Firethorn]

Actually, that's closer to three times that of US rates. You're paying double what I am, and I'm in one of the most expensive regions of the country for electricity. Average in the USA is around 12 cents a kwh. That's about .1€

Re:Great in the winter ..

[Uecker]

The additional cost for renewables for German consumers in 2014 is 6.24 ct/kWh (and parts of the industry is exempt) which is less than other taxes paid on electricity. While solar is still expensive (but went down a lot) wind is clearly one of the cheapest source of energy.

Hello I have a seach warrant for your computers.

[nevermindme]

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.

Re:Hello I have a seach warrant for your computers

[TheCarp]

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.

Outsourcing

[ericloewe]

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.

Re:Half of slashdotters have had this idea...

[Immerman]

Well, if you're concerned about security you shouldn't be putting stuff in "the cloud" to begin with - it's far more likely that a crooked IT guy at the hosting company will be compromising your data than the random guy whose house contains the servers you're using today. As for reliability - that would be a mixed bag. Software wise, assuming redundant virtualized servers, etc. reliability should be largely unaffected. If anything it should increase since a single localized disaster can't take out nearly as much hardware at once. Hardware-wise, you will see longer down times due to house calls but that's visible primarily to the hosting company, not the customer, and the cost is likely negligible compared to the rent savings.