6.5.

11 Title: The location of datacentres Summary & article: Datacentres require two key elements to be as cost effective as possible; firstly located in a cool environment as they produce enormous amounts of heat energy and secondly with a good affordable power resource. In the light of this, there have been some interesting locations either being used or touted as suitable sites for datacentres. For example, Antarctica the McMurdo Station serving the scientific research centre with 64 servers and more than 2TB of storage connected to desktops in a Gigabit Ethernet network. There are also disused mines in Japan (Oracle are saving $9m a year due to the removal of water cooling), caves in Sweden, a chapel in Spain as well as a Cathedral in Finland (heat transferred to warm about 500 homes). Another suitable location is in Iceland, a former NATO airbase in Keflavik, with low temperatures all year round and naturally chilled water as well as geothermal and hydroelectric energy for a green datacentre. Talking of green, the Condorcet datacentre in Paris is designed to be energy efficient (reducing power consumption by 28 million kWh per year) and uses waste energy to heat an arboretum which is used to study climate change. In the USA the particle accelerator in Texas, which was abandoned in 1993, has 14 miles of tunnels and is being marketed as a location for a tier III or IV datacentre. And if security is an issue the Mountain Complex & Data Center in the Ozark Mountains offers 3 million square feet, 100 feet below the surface. Last, but not least, Google has patented the idea of putting datacentres on platforms that would sit 3-7 miles offshore with the absence of property taxes and building regulations combined with the availability of wind and wave power.

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