Cloud Computing Goes Green In Finland

With the thought to make the greenest data center on the planet, a city power firm Helsingin Energia of Helsinki preparing the data center in the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral.

Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki's most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channelled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.

Finland and other north European countries are using their water-powered networks as a conduit for renewable energy sources: capturing waste to heat the water that is pumped through the system.

Due online in January, the new data center for local information technology services firm Academica is one way of addressing environmental concerns around the rise of the internet as a central repository for the world's data and processing -- known as "cloud computing."

Companies seeking large-scale, long-term cuts in information technology spending are concentrating on data centers, which account for up to 30 percent of many corporations' energy bills.

Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing.

One major problem is that in a typical data center only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing -- the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.

Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one third of those of airlines, but are growing 10 percent a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.

The center's location in the bowels of the cathedral has an added bonus: security. It is taking over a former bomb shelter carved into the rock by the fire brigade in World War Two as a refuge for city officials from Russian air raids.

Source : REUTERS