Thursday 29 July 2010
Yahoo! like most companies operating mainly in the online space; has a big dependence on data centers which are far from cheap to run. With that in mind the company has announced a new data center project that it claims is, “one of the greenest, most energy-efficient data centers in the world”. If you listen to the details you can see why that may actually be true. The new data center will be located in Lockport, New York with the bulk of the energy it requires to run coming from the huge renewable energy source that is the Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power is put to good use too as the construction will not require the use of air conditioning meaning 90% of the power goes to the servers. More typical data centers only use around 50% of the power for the servers.
Being able to run a data center without air conditioning meant thinking about the design of the building a bit differently. The structure will be called the Yahoo! Computing Coup because it looks like a building chickens would live in. The roof will go to a high point and the walls are louvered allowing the cooling to occur 100% through outside air. As well as the announcement of a new data center Yahoo! also outlined plans to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the company by 40% by 2014. Yahoo! aims to achieve such a significant drop mainly through improvements to its existing data centers, but also by rethinking how to utilize servers more efficiently, seeking out clean energy to use, and taking advantage of cloud computing where possible.
