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Underground data centre to heat Helsinki

By Leigh-Ann Francis
Johannesburg, 01 Dec 2009

Underground data centre to heat Helsinki

In the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki, Finland, a city power firm is preparing what it thinks will be the greenest data centre on the planet, reports CNET News.

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," says Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia.

Xhead = UK grants £50m to green research

The UK has committed £50 million (R609 million) over the next five years to create a global research network that developing nations can use to better understand possible strategies for tackling the effects of climate change, states Computing.co.uk.

The Climate and Development Knowledge Network will be funded by the Department for International Development and is intended to provide developing countries with access to research that has so far been unavailable to them or has been difficult to interpret for local use.

Douglas Alexander, secretary of state for international development, says that to be effective, any financing arrangements to help southern nations deal with climate change agreed at the UN's climate change talks in Copenhagen next month must be backed up by the detailed research that rich countries take for granted when making decisions.

Power, space costs to increase

According to analyst firm Gartner, the problems of power, cooling and space costs that have dogged data centre administrators over the past few years will only get worse in 2010, says eWeek.

Given that, the onus will be put on data centre managers to figure out how to soften the blow on their companies.

Analysts say businesses need to be proactive in dealing with rapidly rising costs. The report comes just before Gartner hosts its Data Centre Conference in Las Vegas, 1 to 4 December.

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