Yan Ness, CEO of Online Technologies Corporation, discusses a plan to put Michigan in the lead of the movement to green data centers. Yan's solution would capitalize on Michigan's unique positioning in the center of the Great Lakes region.
In this podcast (Quicktime ipod compatible, 128MB; Google streaming flash video), Yan Ness, CEO of Online Technologies Corporation, and I (Bud Gibson) discuss a project he has for greening data centers by capitalizing on one of Michigan's most abundant natural resources, water. In a nutshell, the plan is to place data centers on the Northern Coast of Michigan, providing them with underground storage reservoirs. Water would be pumped in to the reservoirs and cooled at night when energy is cheap. During the day, air would be fanned across the cooled water to provide cooling for the data center. In juxtaposition to current data center construction practices, this project is far-reaching and visionary. We spent much of the interview dissecting the underlying market and business model rationales that would justify this project.
Online Technologies Corporation is an Internet infrastructure provider. They provide main data center facilities for start-up companies like Compendia Bioscience that provides genomic data to researchers. At a larger scale, Online Technologies Corporation also provides back-up data centers for large financial and other transaction heavy services, many of which are household names. As a result, Yan is well-versed in the data center business model and the issues having the highest visibility in the market place.
It's no secret that energy costs and, in particular cooling costs, play a significant role in data centers. In Yan's business, energy costs account for 15 to 20% of revenues, of which 5 to 7% are directly related to cooling. This amount is roughly half Online Technologies Corporation profit margin. However, the impacts of the need for cooling go well beyond driving costs. Yan estimates that cooling equipment currently occupies half the floor space in a data center, effectively limiting the productivity of any given location. Given the doubling in data center heat output every 18 months, and the much more gradual 5 to 10% annual increase in cooling efficiency, the situation will only get worse.
Further, there is a general, increasing pressure in the country to consider green solutions as the costs of energy rise and environmental impacts become more apparent. The pressure is such that solutions do not always need to be strictly justified on short-term economics, witness the popularity of hybrid vehicles which are close to a wash economically relative to other vehicles. Yan suspects that some high visibility web companies will show a similar willingness to be early adopters of green technology.
Hence, the willingness to seriously consider visionary solutions of the type Yan is proposing. He has had initial expressions of interest from companies like Yahoo and Google. However, the project is clearly longer term. As Yan himself notes, he needs to sell the Department of Environmental Quality on the idea, and he needs further scientific support.
Additional Links
- The Green Grid Alliance is a computer industry organization with the mission of raising awareness about data center power consumption and developing metrics for measuring how green a data center is. It is populated with high visibility computer equipment manufacturers.
- This analysis of one of Google's data centers in Oregon points to the need for low cost power to supply a center intended to work at web scale.
- As of 2006, Michigan had the 19th highest cost of power in the United States.
- [Update: 8/12/2007]: Yan has provided a link indicating that over 60% of a data center's power goes to cooling.
Consider, though, if this innovation has a limited life span. The problem is based on the current design of data storage that uses electricity through copper and transistors which produces heat through resistance. There are limitations to this technology, though. The silicon chips used have a resonant frequency that is being reached while the demand for more speed remains constant. Manufacturers have had to address this by offering dual chip sets because they haven’t yet been able to exceed the threshold. It could be that technological advancements have brought us to the point where serious focus should be placed on the use of light and fiber optics rather than electricity and copper. Computers utilizing this technology already exist, but it is very expensive. Of course, so was the first desktop computer of the 1980s. If computer and data storage technology changes to fiber optics based, then heat control will become a moot point.
Neil Gounaris