[Cialug] Tips for a green(er) data center

[murraymckee at wellsfargo.com]

We use the heat off the computers to heat the rest of the building.  I
don't know what it is now, but 10 - 15 years ago we didn't use any
additional heat until the outside temperature was below zero.

I haven't been in the computer room for a decade or more, until last
week.  (Improved security you know.)  I was surprised at how much empty
space there was in the computer room now.  

I can remember when our online system disk farm was 5 rows of 22 disk
packs, each in a machine almost the size of a washer or drier.  Now it's
in two boxes the size of an upright freezer and they have an order of
magnitude more capacity and aren't full, but we wanted the redundancy.

We've been through 4 building expansions in the last 2 decades so I'm
sure we have to start using additional heating sooner now.  On the other
hand, most now have a computer on their desk and every one of them is
generating heat, many all night as well as all day, whether or not they
are doing something useful.  

Murray McKee 
Operating Systems Engineer
WFFIS - Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems 
800 Walnut Street
MAC F4030-033
Des Moines, IA 50309-3605
WORK (515)557-6127 Cell (515) 890-9660  FAX (515) 557-6046
MurrayMcKee at WellsFargo.com 
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-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On
Behalf Of kristau
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 9:42 AM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Tips for a green(er) data center

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 9:40 PM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org>
wrote:
>  Or use the waste heat from the servers for something practical like
>  supplementing the water heater or producing moonshine.

In our new server room design, we intend to redirect the server room
heat out to our warehouse/production floor to supplement the heating.

I was unsuccessful in my bid to set up a moonshine distillery, though.

-- 
Tired programmer
Coding late into the night
The core dump follows

My GNUPG public key is available at
http://www.kristau.net/public_key.asc
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