Google has been granted a US patent for its floating data center idea which the company originally filed with the patent office on February 26, 2007. The patent describes a fleet of ships which would use Mother Ocean to cool and power the Google Data Centers in an economical AND environmentally friendly way : Water Based Data Center.
A system includes a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.
In a fitting tribute, I’ll turn the rest of this post over to Bill Slawski, the search patent man, and his blog SEO by the SEA – which in one way or another seems to have foreshadowed this Google patent.
In the post Search on the Seas: Google Water-Based Data Center Patent Granted, Bill lists some of the topics covered in the patent as :
- Wave powered generators such as Pelamis machines may power sea-based data centers and pumps to cool them.
- The data centers might be contained in standard shipping containers, loaded aboard ships and connected to cooling and electrical systems aboard those ships. The ships may then be deployed to where they are needed. Google has previously been granted a patent for a Modular Data Center
- The patent notes in closing that electricity could also be generated from other sources to power data centers, such as sea-based wind generator farms and power from river currents.
A little off topic, but one of the first questions which comes into my mind is where exactly would these floating data centers be located and if in International waters, what kind of security measures would Google have in place to protect their fleet of data on the open seas?
