Cloud computing goes green underground in Finland

By Tarmo Virki

HELSINKI, Nov 30 (Reuters) - In the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral, a city power firm is preparing what it thinks will be the greenest data center on the planet.

Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki's most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channelled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.

"It is perfectly feasible that a quite considerable proportion of the heating in the capital city could be produced from thermal energy generated by computer halls," said Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia. Finland and other north European countries are using their water-powered networks as a conduit for renewable energy sources: capturing waste to heat the water that is pumped through the system.

Due online in January, the new data center for local information technology services firm Academica is one way of addressing environmental concerns around the rise of the internet as a central repository for the world's data and processing -- known as "cloud computing".

Companies seeking large-scale, long-term cuts in information technology spending are concentrating on data centers, which account for up to 30 percent of many corporations' energy bills.

Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing.

One major problem is that in a typical data centre only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing -- the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.