Years ago as a camp counselor in upstate New York, I slept in a converted chicken coop. Boy, was it cold at night–and this was during the summer.
I was reminded of my chilly time at camp by this announcement from Yahoo!:
Yahoo! also announced that it would build a state-of-the-art data center near Buffalo, N.Y. — beating out sites in Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — that would take advantage of the region’s hydropower and climate. Among other things, the data center will operate without any chillers, utilizing a natural cooling system supplied entirely by the cool air coming off Lake Erie. Chillers are among the most energy-intensive parts of a data center.
The Buffalo center has been dubbed the Yahoo Computing Coop, because “it looks like something chickens live in,” says Filo.
Data centers can get very hot, and it’s great to see Yahoo! using natural cool air flow, rather than an air conditioning system that would produce high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
