Top five datacenter stories that sound like April Fool's, but aren't.
I'm not a big fan of the April Fool's joke edition from otherwise straightforward data sources, especially technical ones. Face it, most of you are pretty literal minded folks, and the best April Fool's editorial is that which could potentially be believable. And in this business there is a fine line between things that are far-fetched and things that some vendor is actually doing. So here are my top non-joke eyebrow raisers for you datacenter blog readers.
•1. HP is powering your datacenter with cow flop.
Yep, HP is doing research on powering your datacenter with the manure produced by the millions of cows out there turning grass into a potentially valuable resource for energy generation.
•2. Powering your back-up generators with leftovers from the local fast food joints
Bio-diesel is in pretty wide use at this time, but it has yet to really make an impact on stand-by electric generation systems. It could have some real benefits in that space.
•3. You can run your datacenter strictly on the power of the sun
Solar-power as a sole source of energy isn't practical yet for large scale datacenters, but the efforts being made to develop small-multi-node distributed datacenter technologies may bear fruit in this arena.
- 4. Datacenters have replaced jewelry stores as the target for high-end international thieves
It hasn't gotten quite that bad, yet, but datacenter thefts, ranging from smash and grab break-ins to outright armed robbery are something that datacenter operators and telcos now have to factor into their datacenter planning
•5. Hide your datacenter under a 19th century cathedral and use its waste to heat the neighborhood
It might sound like the plot of a bad post-apocalyptic survivor movie next Saturday on the SyFy channel, but it exist in Helsinki, Finland, under the Uspenski Cathedral, which sees more than half a million tourists each year.