Microsoft Brings Two More Mega Data Centers Online in July

re: Microsoft Brings Two More Mega Data Centers Online in July

Swissmonkey — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:32:02 GMT

Why not use water to cool the datacenter? You could then use the warmth to heat a swimming pool, or heat the building, or heat other buildings with a district heating system.

re: Microsoft Brings Two More Mega Data Centers Online in July

Tom Nead — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:16:05 GMT

Great to read and see your infrastructure construction efforts coming to fruition, Arne. The scale of the centers and the technologies you're deploying continue to be very impressive indeed! With the Supreme Court ruling yesterday in favor of Cablevision's network DVR service, it's yet another strong indicator that your data center investments will pay off. Cloud computing investments will no doubt reap great rewards.

Hope you're well!

Regards,

Tom

Director, Convergys Corp.

re: Microsoft Brings Two More Mega Data Centers Online in July

Kevin Bross — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:28:03 GMT

Re: Comment on using water to heat swimming pool

There are some applications to this (Intel posted some information on this at http://www.intel.com/it/pdf/Data-Center-Heat-Recovery.pdf), but the big issue is one of scale. 200MW converted to heat is one giant toaster--a swimming pool is too small a heat sink to absorb all that energy. Some of the heat can be used for something like this, but it's unlikely that you would have a need for that much hot water directly adjacent to a data center.

[There's an interesting example where Tampa Electric's Big Bend power plant creates a warm enough discharge into a canal that it has become a home for manatees: see http://www.tampaelectric.com/manatee/about/ for more info.]

A big issue is what to do during the hottest months. These are the times that swimming pools, greenhouses, and office buildings are unlikely to want the hot water, so you still need the big HVAC plants. During cooler weather, economizer modes or other "free cooling" mechanisms might reduce the amount of hot water available for other purposes.

re: Microsoft Brings Two More Mega Data Centers Online in July

msdcblog — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:56:32 GMT

We are moving our primary means of cooling forward with airside economization such as we’ve deployed in our latest Dublin facility in order to significantly reduce our water and energy consumption. In both airside and water cooled data centers, we continue to investigate effective systems for heat recovery. [Daniel Costello]