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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Private university Notre Dame will be using waste heat from some of its servers to provide a warm environment for a collection of conservatories and indoor botanical gardens located in South Bend, Indiana.
According to a report from Clean Technica, the Notre Dame's containerized data center, built in a standard shipping container, will be positioned next to the South Bend Conservatory, providing a hot, arid climate for cacti and other desert plants in northern Indiana, which has cold, snowy winters, and boasts a lowest recorded temperature of -18°F for the month of December.
The partnership will save Notre Dame $100,000 in data cooling costs, and the city will save the $70,000 in heating bills for the conservatory, reducing its costs costs to $0, which is crucial for the South Bend Conservatory, which was threatened with closure in late 2006 due to budget concerns.
Heating costs had been scrapped entirely from the city's 2010 budget, so this idea will be a lifeline for the conservatory. The project might be able to save it from shutting down for good.
This is just the latest example of data center waste heat being put to good use. Earlier this month, the WHIR reported on an Orthodox church in Helsinki, Finland that will be housing a computer room that will generate enough heat to warm 500 single-family houses.
The re-purposing of data center waste energy has also been experimented with elsewhere. As part of its billion-dollar Project Big Green initiative, IBM (www.ibm.com) launched a Zurich, Switzerland, facility that uses waste heat to warm up a public swimming pool for local residents.
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July 2010 - What's Next? Forecasting Hosting's Future
Technically, there's nothing new about us posing the question, "what are the next steps hosting providers must take to capitalize on the opportunities available in the business?" From the 10,000-foot view, that's the basic premise that underlies just about everything the WHIR publishes or produces. In this particular case, however, we're looking at it through an extremely significant contextual lens. That is, for much of the last two years, hosting providers have been operating in a business climate defined by an economy in crisis.
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March 2010 - Web Hosting in Europe
Europe cuts an interesting figure in our coverage of the web hosting industry. From a purely news standpoint, it is very possible to treat Europe in more or less the same way that we treat North America - that is, report the facts, ask the right questions, try to anticipate the issues raised. From an analytical standpoint, however, we present a distinctly North American point of view - this being the product of circumstances (our location), rather than a bias.
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January 2010 - Hottest Hosts Directory
In 2008, in our inaugural Hottest Hosts guide, I wrote that we were exploring a new format with the first in-print directory of web hosting services. And last year, I discussed the project in the context of an ongoing project, and a growing tradition here at the Web Host Industry Review. The objective, however, is not to repeat ourselves, but to help the directory evolve into a more valuable resource - something that's going to help you with your purchasing decisions, and something you're going to hold on to for the duration of the year.
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