Google's  US patent 7525207 for its  floating data center powered by theocean to generate power and cooling, was first reported by
SEO by the Sea  The application, filed in February 2007, was published in October 2008, and granted April this year.  Coincidentally in October 2008  US investment bank Morgan Stanley was believed to be planning a £250m to £300m off-grid data center in northern Scotland directly powered by tidal energy from Atlantis Resource turbines using the power of waves.

The patent background concludes: "Information data centers may be moved closer to users, with relevant content sent from a central facility out to regional data centers only once, and further transmissions occurring over shorter regional links. As a result, every request from a user need not result in a transmission cross-country and through the internet backbone - network activity may be more evenly balanced and confined to local areas. Also, transient needs for computing power may arise in a particular area.

"A military presence may be needed in an area, a natural disaster may bring a need for computing or telecommunication presence in an area until the natural infrastructure can be repaired or rebuilt, and events may draw  thousands of people who may put a load on local computing infrastructure. Often, such transient events occur near water, as a river or an ocean. However, it can be expensive to build and locate data centers, and it is not always easy to find access to necessary (and inexpensive) electrical power, high-bandwidth data connections, and cooling water for such data centers."

In its application, Google explains that the floating data centers would be located 3 to 7 miles from shore, in 164 to 230 feet of water. If the technology is perfected, it would allow Google to construct 40MW data centers, intriguingly free of real estate costs or property taxes. Incorporating wave energy machines, the floating data center would use ocean surface waves to generate electricity to form "wave farms." The patent also details a cooling system based on sea-powered pumps and seawater-to-freshwater heat exchangers.

The Google patent is for "a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units."  Inventors listed are Jimmy Clidaras, David Stiver and William Hamburgen as inventors.

But the fact that Google's  co-inventor Jimmy Clidaras, director of data centre R&D recently outlined Google's 2005 use of a 75,000 sq.ft  hanger center, equipped with 45 containers, some stored on a second story balcony, (each container with capacity of up to 1,160 servers, using 250kW power with 10MW power capacity, usage effectiveness of 1.25 and total density of 133 watts per sq.ft

Designed with a "power above, water below" strategy, Clidaras said the racks are actually hung from the container's ceiling. Cooling distributed from below the floor into the hot aisle through a raised floor, is sent through the racks before finally returned through a plenum behind the racks. Variable speed cooling fans run at the lowest speed required to cool the rack at any point in time.

Trying to get a US mindset on the Data Centre Compute Scotland questioned Charles King, (right) principal analyst at Pund-IT Inc. on some issues.

CS: What are considered the attractive geographic places for set up?
CK:That’s an issue that’s been shifting in the US. Traditionally, primary datacenters are built close to companies’ headquarters in (mostly) urban areas, and older technologies required back-up/disaster recovery facilities to be constructed relatively close by.

Three things are changing that approach significantly: 1) increasing power requirements (due to high-density blade servers and other technologies) have resulted in many facilities power needs outstripping what’s available from local utilities, 2) the improved latency offered by some solutions (EMC’s SRDF is a good example) have helped significantly extend the distance between primary/back-up facilities, and  3) concerns about natural and unnatural disasters have forced companies to rethink their datacenter strategies.

CS: What are the lures to centre location i.e. government grants, staff, reliable infrastructure, power ?
CK: Tax breaks (in the US provided by state and local governments) play a role in attracting businesses. But there have been numerous instances where companies simply packed-up and moved after the grant period ended, casting a pall on the long term value of such schemes to local communities.

In the US, there have been a host of datacenter owners (with Google and Yahoo leading the pack) who have reportedly built enormous facilities in rural locations with ready access to renewable energy resources (primarily hydroelectric). I expect this trend to continue here and elsewhere. In fact, there were plans afoot early last year in Iceland to promote the country as an ideal location for remote datacenter/disaster recovery facilities due to its location & geothermal power resources. Not sure how that’s faring now given the country’s economic meltdown…

CS: Are good communications essential?
CK: Companies have more flexibility here than they do with energy availability. They can always pull in fibre if the location is otherwise ideal. Here in the US, there was an big telecom construction push during the dot.com era (the infamous Enron was a big promoter of this) with the result that most urban/suburban areas have access to more bandwidth than they can use. Rural areas, however, have mostly been left in the dial-up cold.

CS: Do companies start  local and get lured elsewhere?
CK: Companies certainly do move facilities, but I can’t think of many instances where they’re lured away from one community by another. It’s more often a situation where the bean counters decide that the benefits of doing business in a new place outweigh those of the previous location to a degree that pays off the cost/complexities of the move (What’s happening with tech companies moving from Ireland to Eastern Europe is worth considering).

There are times when such a move makes more financial/logistical sense than others. For example, it’s estimated that nearly 75%  of US corporate datacenters were constructed prior to 1995, making them increasingly unable to cope with current/new generations of server, storage and networking technologies. As companies upgrade or replace  facilities, many will at least consider changing/moving locations.

CS: Any staffing problems?
CK  One issue we’ve been hearing a bit about is IT administrators’ enthusiasm (or lack, thereof) for working in rural datacenters. Seems more popular among older workers with families (who enjoy the bucolic quality of life issues) than younger staff who prefer living in/near the city.

In some cities (particularly along the eastern seaboard) energy availability is an increasingly common issue, and here in California drought conditions are threatening to impact power generation in some areas. But in the mid-west (along the Mississippi River) where inexpensive coal powers many utilities, electricity is easily available and relatively cheap. So it’s not a one size fits all equation by any means.

Today's datacentre service shopping?
Compute Scotland went to look at nearby European datacentres  emerging with Belgium, Denmark, Luxenberg and Netherlands centres and a further 48 datacenters in the UK alone.  Rack Space sites (left) for example range from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Netherlands, to Hong Kong, South Africa and the US.  
LCL Belgium:
NetGroup Data Center Denmark
Datacenter Luxembourg S.A.
Redbus Netherlands


Scotland's current trio
Below Zero
Below Zero operate from two Data Centres in Edinburgh, Scotland providing multiple high-capacity, self-healing connections to the Internet with guaranteed performance. Unlike the majority of ISPs Below Zero specialise in this area and focus solely on the hosting of Co-located Servers and their associated systems. In its seventh year Below Zero has a proven track record of keeping critical services connected to the Internet with almost Zero Downtime. Since the beginning of 1997 staff have been servicing household names and government bodies with colocation. Latest News - details of our five bandwidth providers can be found here and a slideshow of one of our Data Centres.

Lumison
In the summer of 1995, Lumison CEO Aydin Kurt-Elli was halfway through reading medicine at Edinburgh University. Having spent much of his childhood learning how to use computers, he was entranced by the opportunities the Internet presented as it emerged from the university departments to home and business users through the early 90’s. Visiting his parents who had moved to Sydney at that time, he spent the summer of ‘95 drafting a quick business plan for creating edNET, a local dialup ISP based in Edinburgh, begged some money to get him started, and the rest (as they say) is history. 

ScoLocate
ScoLocate is a technology management company, focused entirely on managing our clients supporting infrastructure. It provide professional and managed services to the IT marketplace, specialising in IT architecture, design and planning, project management and implementation services, remote and on-site managed services.
With its  Data Center at the Gyle, Edinburgh, ScoLocate provides clients with a secure and reliable technical environment. In addition, the full range of managed services offered ensures a dependable, secure and trusted environment within which clients can grow their online presence. This total or complex hosting solution allows organisations to outsource the entire facilitation and day-to-day management of their infrastructure, maximising their return on investment and allowing them to focus on their core business activities.

On the Scottish coastline and remote drawing boards

Inverness.
Scotland has also been targeted by Microsoft as the company partnered with IT firm Alchemy Plus to announce at £20m "cloud computing" data centre in Inverness that should come into operation by the end of 2010 creating 400 new jobs in the area.The news comes on the heels of

Pentland Firth
Morgan Stanley were bruited  to be be building its large, off-grid computer data centre of 150Mw/hours power in Scotland, powered directly by tidal energy from the (left) Pentland Firth. Cable & Wireless (through recently acquired THUS) is undertaking the network part in the construction of a high technology village in the 'borders' area between Scotland and England. The development will comprise a 3m2ft data centre and 1000 new homes, designed to work together to conform to range of sustainability goals.

Solway Firth
Now a new scheme is being aired to harness tidal power to power a "cloud-computing" data centre near Ecclefechan (best known for its famous cakes) in Dumfries and Galloway. Internet Villages International (IVI), are again behind the proposed data centre, but has now joined with marine turbine developers, Atlantis Resources.

Lockerbie
Dumfries and Galloway Council has received documents related to a £800m data centre that could create up to 1000 new jobs in the region. The plans for the huge Lockerbie Data Centre project have been submitted in a bid to build one of the world's largest data centres, coming close on the heels of a similar application for a nearby site from Internet Villages International which was announced  in 2007. The IVI project, which will be located in the north of Lockerbie, is expected to house a whopping 20 data centres and cost north of £600m although some put it closer to  £1.2bn. The Scottish construction project comes amidst industrywide predictions that nearly 90% of data centre storage worldwide will be occupied by 2010 and the £800m  enterprise seeks to corner a fraction of the market. The data centre compound will include high tech office space, a business park and up to 750 new homes as part of a sustainable village.

In 2009 however, events may have pushed datacentres onto a very slow backburner.