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Last week the experimental data center in a cave got a lot of attention, and with good reason.  Utilization of creative space like that is a really great step in the right direction, and all the natural cooling available in a limestone cave is a very sci-fi way to deal with the ever-present problem of data center cooling.  But that’s not the only exciting and innovative data center story to come up lately.

Another experimental data center has been set up in Italy to work
on improving energy efficiency, using new technologies and gauging how they compare to “legacy systems.”  Learn more from Data Center Dynamics’ article.  One of the participants in that study is Politecnico di Milano, a university in Milan.  Unsurprisingly, universities are responsible for a lot of data center research.

It’s been coming up a lot lately even though the news came out months ago: Notre Dame’s idea of heating a greenhouse with the
waste heat from an on-campus data center, now containerized near the greenhouse.  The historic greenhouse was in serious danger of being shut down because of all the energy required to heat it, and what with the constant struggle to deal with all the heat produced in a data center, this seems like a pretty ingenious symbiosis which Notre Dame has achieved.  The article from SearchDataCenter also talks about data centers which have been used to heat offices and swimming pools.  Alsorecently in the news was the data center under construction underneath a cathedral in Finland, the waste heat of which is going to be used to heat homes in the area.

At Syracuse University, they’re using what IBM has described as the greenest data center constructed so far.  Although it isn’t using any particularly new technologies, its trick is combining the most efficient systems around for maximum results.  Check out the details at Server Technology.

One last thing is UC Berkeley (my school!) has a one-meeting class on Green IT Project Management: Data Center Energy Efficiency through its Extension program.  It kind of goes to show how prevalent concerns about green IT are getting.

-Elizabeth English