Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

Google like all the big players needs huge data centers positioned around the world to handle the vast amounts of data they collect. In the March issue of Harper’s Magazine, author Ginger Strand gives her take on Google’s energy consumption needs and provides a sneak peek at Google’s, used to be secret, super cloud computing data center in The Dalles, Orgegon. Included is the blueprint to Google The Dalles data center.

“Velcroed together, stacked in racks, and lined up in back-to-back rows, the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing, and Google leads the field in squeezing more servers into less space. Based on projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot in 2011, the Dalles plant can be expected to demand about 103 megawatts of electricity - enough to npower 82,000 homes, or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington.”

With these type of energy needs it’s no wonder Google is investing big time in renewable energy and plans on being a leader in the field. The author it appears is not convinced of Google’s good intentions when it comes to clean energy. You be the judge.

ReadWriteWeb has a good article on cloud computing today.

The first, Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds, is written the Amazon Web Services outage last Friday fresh in our minds. I’m a big proponent of cloud computing as it’s the only way in my opinion to truly scale large data driven applications such as search which is what I’m working on.

“So is it really true - is cloud computing a bad idea? Of course not. It is a wonderful, powerful idea. In this post, we explore the ideas behind cloud computing and argue that it will be an integral part of our future.”

“Do Clouds Really Work?

You bet! The best example is Google. The king of the web is reigning with a farm of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of boxes. To race along with the web, Google constantly increases the size of its cloud, incorporating new web sites, and expanding its index.

Of course, Google isn’t the only one operating in a cloud. All major web players including Amazon, eBay, Yahoo! and Facebook are running some sort of massive computing cloud.”