As the number of datacenters with more and more “cloud” computing grows, energy consumption and cooling costs become a major cost factor.
Google seems to have very bold strategy as GigaOm notices. The Datacenter knowledge center has identified their strategy to locate a datacentre in a location where cooling costs are virtually zero for the better part of the year.
The most interesting part is the ability to automatically shift the workload to another datacentre based on the weather forecast (hot weather over here, cold weather over there). The next step is to ‘follow the moon”: the computation is shifted to datacentres which experience the night. A wave of computation in a 24 hrs cycle. Google can do it with their extensive privately owned worldspanning optical network.
Neat trick: it will also lower the electricity costs because there is excess capacity at night (usually).
