From Datacenter Dynamics:
Germans get free heating from the cloud
The idea of cloud heating won’t go away. Germany now has a company, Cloud&Heat, which offers free hot water from a distributed data center installed in your office.
Cloud&Heat places servers on remote premises (potentially your office). They process data for Cloud&Heat’s data customers, and heat your building with the waste heat. Cloud customers get cheap pay-as-you-go cloud compute, block storage and object storage, based on OpenStack. Heat customers (the people who host the server cabinets) get free heating.
It’s a similar deal to Qarnot, the French outfit we mentioned a couple of weeks back. But where Qarnot is planning to offer domestic heating with a wall-mounted four-processor radiator, Cloud&Heat is pitching a bigger unit. Its site says it could work for single-family dwellings, but the pictures show a sizable cabinet that would be more at home on business premises.
The last lab I worked at at MSFT had over 1,500 computers - we simulated large loads against servers. What happens if 30,000 B&N customers try to order a book. The room had specialized cooling and if it went down, the air temp would quickly rise to over 90°F in twenty minutes. We would have to power down the test racks until the HVAC people fixed the problem. The coolers were built by a certain German company whose name begins with 'S'. I would never do business with them ever - they have quite the industry reputation.
Talk about turning a liability into a virture...