Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Facebook puts a data center near the arctic circle. The natural cold air will cool the computers. Why is this news? Why is this hailed as a brilliant “green” action?

It was December of 1980. We had a small room with a dozen racks of heat-producing equipment that needed to be cooled. Outside, it was 20 degrees F in the middle of the afternoon and 10 degrees F at night.

And we had two window air conditioners consuming vast amounts of electricity pumping cool air on the hot equipment.

I thought this was sort of silly. Other people agreed, but we couldn’t rig the window air conditioners to suck the cold air from outside into the otherwise hot room. And we couldn’t open the windows for some reason.

Two years later, we were in another location with several dozen racks of heat-producing equipment. We had no air conditioners as some shipments of air conditioners had lost their way. That was a blessing. We had an excuse to open the doors and let the frigid winter air blow in to cool the equipment. We also had terrible problems with dust and dirt coming in with the frigid air, but that is another story for another day.

Over the years, I have lost count and memories of all the similar situations I have seen. We had massive air conditioners cooling computers, while next door we had massive heaters keeping the offices warm.

How about blowing the hot air from the computers into the cold offices?

That never worked for some reason.

Now, however, we are “going green.” Facebook, as one example, is opening a data center in Sweden near the arctic circle. They will open the windows and doors and block the dust to cool the computers. This is wonderful.

What took so long?

I don’t have an answer to that one. There is hot air and cold air sitting about all around us. Find ways to move the air to where you want it. You will save some money and electricity and all sorts of other things.