A self-powered data center placed three to seven miles offshore, potentially operating off the grid: Standard shipping containers would house racks of computers that could be transported by truck and placed onto a boat by crane.
The hidden cost of the triumph of the Internet is the rise of the data center. The Net runs on huge complexes of hot, power-hungry servers that eat up real estate and energy in massive quantities — in 2006 data centers consumed a staggering 1.5% of the U.S.'s entire supply of electricity. Engineers at Google may have found a way out: the self-sufficient floating data center. According to a patent filed by Google, wind turbines and wave-powered generators will provide the electricity. Ocean water will cool the servers, which throw off huge amounts of heat. And offshore real estate is essentially free.
A wave-power generator would be the primary source of electricity. But wind turbines could be used to, for example, run water pumps and a tidal power generator could be used in rivers. The patent specifies the use of a so-called Pelamis machine, which uses pontoons with pumps to convert wave motion into electricity. A British company, Pelamis Wave Power, is operating a prototype in Scotland and intends to install one off Portugal.
Google engineers calculate that an array of pontoons spread over a square kilometer (a bit more than a half mile) could produce 30 megawatts of electricity, enough to operate a single system.
Read more at : http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/09/06/google-planning-offshore-data-barges/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10034753-54.html
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