It’s one thing to build a data center in a place like Iceland that can deliver 100 percent clean power through geothermal and hydropower. It’s another thing entirely to completely redesign the concept of a data center around distributed renewable energy. That’s the idea behind a project called OZZO, from Frank Bertram, the CEO of the Dutch data analysis company MDES, and which Data Center Knowledge takes a look at this morning.
The idea behind the OZZO project is to break up data center storage into three types of distributed nodes based on the type of data stored, and the local clean power that can be used. The idea came from studying bees, according to the video clip from the group. By segmenting the single nodes by data type and energy needed like cells in a honeycomb, the overall system can be more efficient and self-sufficient. Well, that’s the idea anyway.
The first type of node would house “hot data” or data that is accessed and changed regularly and which requires a lot of energy to manage. The OZZO project says those nodes would be distributed in residential areas and powered by solar. The second type of node would house “cold data” or data that is accessed sometimes but never changed and uses a moderate amount of energy. Those nodes would be placed along windy areas in rows.
The third type of node would house “frozen data” or data that is rarely accessed and rarely changed, which oftentimes makes up 80 percent of the data stored in a data center. Those frozen nodes, which would take almost no energy and are almost always in standby mode, would be placed in areas with wide open spaces and could be powered by biomass.
The idea might sound like pure speculation and that’s because it is. It’s solely in the concept phase right now. The OZZO group says it has a goal is to sign a service level agreement in 2015, and that it’s actively looking for funders and supporters to help begin the project. The group says it has support of municipalities in Amsterdam, where the distributed data center would be built.
The driving force behind this idea and all of the green data center work being done out there is that the massive growth of the Internet and connected, always-on devices will deliver a dramatic increase in energy used by data centers. Data center operators are finding that power consumption has become one of the largest costs of a data center, and the carbon footprint of data centers has grown to over 1.5 percent of the world’s total emissions.
OZZO might end up just another novel but unrealistic idea on the road to greener data centers, but eventually data centers will be designed much more around energy efficiency and clean power. To learn more about how data centers and cloud computing infrastructure will be affected by energy consumption, come to our Structure event in San Francisco on June 23 and 24.
For more research on green data centers check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):
Report: Green Data Center Design Strategies
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