Darn it. Nearly bought a house last year and the only thing that put me off was it's hot air heating system. If only I'd had the foresight to replace the boiler in the cellar with a few racks.
Cold? Cuddle these HOT GERMAN RACKS, yours for only 12,000 euro – we swear there's an IT angle
A startup in Germany reckons it's found a, how can we put this, courageous way to merge cloud computing with staying warm at home this winter. Rather than throw another log on the fire, you can install one of its toasty server cabinets in your basement. Assuming you have a spare ten grand and a 50Mbps pipe to the internet. …
COMMENTS
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Friday 14th November 2014 10:28 GMT Doctor Syntax
"Cloud&Heat believes it can save on data center facility and cooling costs."
Given that their rent is effectively negative and paid up front they're saving more than that.
" Once the installation fee is paid... for a period of fifteen years."
And what if C&H goes permanently titsup in significantly less than 15 years? That's €12,000 down the drain for their landlords - and maybe the German equivalent of the bailiffs knocking at the front door to demand the racks.
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Friday 14th November 2014 10:44 GMT Peter Gathercole
Nothing new here, move along
Newcastle University used the heat from their water cooled IBM 360/64 and later the 370/168 to help heat Claremont Tower back in the 1970s.
One of my kids uses his gaming rig to keep his bedroom warm without having the radiator turned on.
Both different in scale, but similar in concept.
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Friday 14th November 2014 12:19 GMT Dr. Mouse
Re: Nothing new here, move along
One of my friends had her gas fire in the living room condemned. She started looking at options. One was a nice, pretty "digital" fire. It had a screen, showing images of flames. When asked about heating, the guy avoided the question, until he admitted it put out 200W.
We then specced up an alternative: 32in TV hooked up to an overclocked PC with high end graphics cards, running something like SETI@Home, plus the ability to be hijacked to do video transcoding or other intensive jobs. It cost less than half the "pretty fake fire", but put out (IIRC) 800W of heat and did something "useful" with the power.
We never built it, but it was a nice little project to spec out.
I applaud this project. The only thing wrong with it, IMHO, is the installation costs. Sounds way over the top.
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Friday 14th November 2014 10:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
So...
..I pay you €12,000 for you to put your kit in my building and in return I get to save about a couple of hundred euros a year.
How about you pay ME €12,000 to provide a secure place to put your racks and in return any savings I make on heating, minus the costs incurred cooling the place during the summer, and I'll rebate that amount.
Sounds little fairer to me.
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Friday 14th November 2014 11:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: So...
Basically you're paying them to store servers in your house, which you will probably be financially liable for if they became damaged in any sort of way and the fun is you could be hosting absolutely anything. It could be a real mystery box the contents only known to the NSA. Could be Kim Dot coms MP3 collection, the latest Star Wars film or Rolf Harris's holiday photos you simply won't know until the NSA kick your front (and eventually back door) in all in the name of protecting good old America from terror
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Friday 14th November 2014 12:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: So...
@AC, I guess that's why they are located in Germany only. I would hope that all the data is encrypted, preferably already when arriving and never be in clear text at the hosts' places. That should protect both their clients and hosts. Well, one can hope...
Didn't make a difference with Tor did it? I'm sure I read they were targeting people who merely routed the packets if their contents were deemed dodgy
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Friday 14th November 2014 11:06 GMT Undergrid
So wait... You have to pay them so you can host their hardware in your building and then they will turn around and (I assume) sell time on those systems (whether hosting or cloud compute) to others? In my experience it's the people that want hardware hosted somewhere that do the paying, not the other way around... Who's going to fall for this one?
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Friday 14th November 2014 12:31 GMT John Sturdy
Computer-powered Aga
One company I worked for in the past had an old country house for its main office, which it had to get renovated (OK, the "had to" was the asbestos removal bit, but I digress). The MD was an Aga enthusiast, and the kitchen was next to the machine room, and they looked into cooling the machine room with a heat pump concentrating the heat into an Aga just one wall away. Would have been nice in the winter, not sure about the summer though. And they ended up going for conventionall AC anyway (probably cheaper to install).
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Friday 21st November 2014 08:34 GMT Bob H
Re: Computer-powered Aga
I think the question here is can someone demonstrate effective heat transfer? If it is possible to do more than just create warm water and actually turn the water hot then there might be some money in this. I'm uncertain about the value of €12k but I've been wondering for a while now if this business model could work and someone is actually trying it out.
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