And next ?
OVH is studying several ways to produce energy internally. Unfortunately, France is still experiencing political instability at this level. Simply put, it is not possible today to invest in the production of renewable energy in the long term because the political strategies can change from one year to another and we can end up with an installation that is profitable today and tomorrow will not be.
You should know that energy, oil, gas, wind, water and for example rapeseed oil is a big business and therefore a big lobby. Producing energy from rapeseed and therefore having a clean datacentre and respectful of the environment is beautiful in the media but unrealistic today, because tomorrow we will change the laws because of a lobby or other. Neo less we seek. And we are ready to invest in the production of energy as soon as the political situation stabilizes enough and in the long term (it was the message to the political world).
In the meantime, we are studying and testing to save energy. Of course you already know our liquid cooling system that we have been running since 4 years (already). This system allows us to save 30% the electrical power needed to run the clims, not to mention the stability of the installation.
Indeed, we use water at 11 ° C pumped at 60 meters deep to cool our installation instead of removing heat from the air. We warm up the water and therefore the deep earth instead of the air we breathe.
The own datacentre?
We already have 4 already. We are currently doing cooling tests based on water stratification and / or on systems that store cold and heat. How it works ? We cool huge volumes of water overnight and store them in huge tanks next to our data center.
During the day we use this cold to cool our installation. 2 advantages: we use energy at low cost during the night instead of full price of the day but also we use the cold of the night to evacuate the stored heat of the day. Thanks to this system, we are already saving a lot of energy and making our datacentre more respectful of the environment. These are the tests that we carry out on the datacentre n ° 2 of Roubaix that we think to put in production in an industrial way on datacenter n ° 3 (which will be built starting from 2008 on the ground that we have in Roubaix or / and that we buy in the corner).
Econology server soon powered by rapeseed or biogas?
