At the age of 24 I rode my bike across the 6.5km Columbia River bridge between Oregon and Washington state. Big river, big bridge. I remember thinking it would make a damn :-) good power plant.
Upriver, past Portland and in the shadow of Mount Hood, I hear Google have constructed a 30 acre server farm near the Dalles Dam, just one of several 2 gigawatt hydroelectric schemes up the Columbia gorge.
High bandwidth reliable networks, and the migration of computing power to "web services" in the cloud, mean that one should generally put servers next to cheap power. As long as the datacentre has the appropriate connectivity, the huge capacity and speed of global optical networks mean processing is best placed close to the power, rather than close to the people.
If such dam-envy seems dangerously close to train-spotting, consider that your average punter is now an enthusiastic user of web services like search engines, Internet mail/IM, and web mapping services.
Likewise IT Professionals are increasingly drawn to the irresistible logic of consuming services like email security and management (Exchange Hosted Services) and online Meeting services (Live Meeting) from "the cloud". Its far more efficient and effective to run these generic services centrally in a massively scaled, highly automated datacentre. This tallies up with the traditional business view of outsourcing "non-core" activities like payroll, security, catering, and PC desktop support.
Based on the success of companies like Salesforce, and huge investment from Microsoft, Google and others, it seems that in the next 2 to 5 years will see significant uptake of IT services that are remotely hosted and internet delivered. With data spread across the Internet, and applications running across the browser, desktop and remote datacentres, black-shirt wearing dot-com entrepreneurs have come up with new terms to describe the social and IT phenomenon's like "Web 2.0" and "cloud computing".
Microsoft's Software + Services mantra is a reflection of these new architectures, with some people factors thrown in - users can only use applications which are simple and familiar, and IT people want choice of where they put their servers (in their offices, centrally hosted in a datacenter, or completely outsourced to the cloud).
What this means in practical terms is that we will increasingly depend on 100,000-system datacentres, where automation and economies of scale drive down the cost of these services compared to the in-house IT approach. Microsoft's has a dual role in this - firstly to provide energy and effort efficient platforms and automated management tools, and secondly to provide the tools and building block services which enable this new S+S world.
Which brings us back to the Columbia River. One issue with the above is the growing power consumption of datacentres globally. George Gilder in Wired magazine recently estimated that the datacentres of the 5 leading search engines consume around 5 Gigawatts of power, counting servers, storage, cooling, and the inefficiencies of the grid's power transmission. Compare that to the 60GW peak demand on the UK national grid, and global energy requirements of datacentres can only grow as the global interweb's consumption of these services increases. Power accounts for around 40% of the overall running costs of the typical datacentre, a proportion which will only increase as energy prices increase and improved technology and automation reduce staff costs.
The moral of the story is that building your datacentres next to sources of cheap, clean power, makes good fiscal sense, and gives you a nice warm feeling about doing your bit for the planet.
Scotland, and in particular Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, has extraordinary renewable energy generation potential. Scotland has an estimated potential of 36.5 GW of wind and 7.5 GW of tidal power, 25% of the estimated total capacity for the European Union and up to 14 GW of wave power potential, 10% of EU capacity. Despite this the Scottish government have set modest targets for 6GW from renewable schemes by 2020.
Sadly, the costs and planning issues of grid connection can have an impact on their financial viability and social acceptability. But to overcome these grid-connection issues, why not consume the power at source by placing computing power close to point of generation? The Highlands and Islands region is blessed with lower temperatures and freely available water supplies (to aid cooling), cheaper than average labour, and plenty of tidal, wave, hydro and wind gen capacity.
Such a scheme could use self-contained, modular and portable container-based datacenters to overcome the logistical and skills issues, and allow the Highlands and Islands area to quickly capitalise on its sources of cheap and renewable power.
Container datacentre solutions allow a fully functional datacentre to be dropped in remote locations close to inexpensive power. Rackable systems unveiled such a solution recently, and James Hamilton of Microsoft, who frequently speaks about his ideas for the commodity datacentre, reckons that this approach can help overcome the myriad of political and logistical issues that surround datacentres and their power needs.
Power is currently about 40% of the cost of running a datacentre. With rising fossil energy costs, decreasing hardware/software costs, and decreasing staff costs through automation, this proportion will only increase unless abundant cheap power is nearby.
Coupling renewable energy with the commodity datacenter makes sense to meet our renewable energy goals, create a new source of employment and income for Scotland, and help bridge the predicted 20% " UK energy gap" by 2015.
Perhaps its time for Scotland to look towards the Renewable Energy Datacentre.
