There are many ways to hide from the winter but I recently read a paper presented in ”Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing” that proposes the idea of using cloud server generated heat to warm up houses instead of a furnace or room heaters .

This paper titled “The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing “ was co-authored by Jie Liu, Michel Goraczko, Christian Belady and Sean James from Microsoft Research and Jiakang Lu and Kamin Whitehouse, from the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. The paper puts forward the idea of dispersing the cloud servers amongst homes instead of having a giant volcano in a single place; the heat generated by the servers can help the building/home to survive the winter.

The proposed idea works like this. A homeowner purchases a data furnace for the cost of less than a regular oil-based furnace. The cost to run it is also less than when they were using an oil-based furnace. The maintenance costs and the electricity cost for running the server will be paid by the cloud service provider. Ownership cost-benefit analysis of this model reveals that the correctly designed data furnace will not only heat a 1700 square foot home to 70 degrees Fahrenheit but it also helps cloud service providers save $300 per server per year.

These data furnaces are suitable for delay-tolerant batch works such as non-real-time web crawling or large data processing or online video rental services. With data servers installed locally, location-based services like navigation, traffic monitoring and local store advertisements is provided quickly to people living locally as the servers are distributed locally.

Data furnaces have some limitations which include ensuring the power and network connectivity are even when the building power fails. Physical and data security can also be maintained and any hardware/software problems can be handled quickly and remotely. During summer the heat won’t be a problem as the data furnace will vent the heat outside the building (just like cloth dryers).

The author says ,“Even at the event of software failure, the system should continue to provide heat until receiving physical services.”

The PPT that the authors have uploaded shows the space heating requires power twice the power of IT and so with having furnaces like this we not only save power but also use the heat which is a burden of any data center.

Intel launches its latest power-smart servers, and challenger AMD buys low-power server startup SeaMicro.

Intel has launched its latest iteration of green servers, the Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. The new processors are 50 percent more efficient than the previous Xeon line, and connect to Intel’s Data Center Manager, which links its real-time power and thermal data to existing system management consoles.

This follows the news last week that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was buying SeaMicro, maker of a new class of power-sipping server chips.

Intel forecasts that there will be 15 billion connected devices and over 3 billion connected users by 2015. The amount of global data center IP traffic is forecasted to grow by 33 percent annually through 2015, surpassing 4.8 zetabytes per year, more than 3 times the amount in 2011. At these levels, each connected user will generate more than 4GB of data traffic every day – the equivalent of a 4-hour HD movie. This will increase the amount of data that needs to be stored by almost 50 percent per year. In order to scale to meet this growth, the worldwide number of cloud servers is expected to more than triple by 2015.

“The growth in cloud computing and connected devices is transforming the way businesses benefit from IT products and services,” said Diane Bryant, Intel vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. “For businesses to capitalize on these innovations, the industry must address unprecedented demand for efficient … datacenter infrastructure…”