Have you ever noticed how hot your laptop or desktop computer gets when you work on it for a while? During the cold winter months placing your hands around the edge of the keyboard is an ideal way to warm up.

Think of all the machines in the world giving off ‘I.T.’ heat, all the offices powering up each morning (hopefully by now we’ve all caught on to shutting down at the end of the day), all the data storage, all the people surfing the web for great articles like this…..quite overwhelming to consider how much heat all this essential hardware generates. Does anyone really know?

I don’t actually have an answer to that particular question, but I can tell you that one data storage company is expected to produce enough heat from its new 130,000 square foot Docklands facility to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community. Telehouse West is a new £80 million state-of-the-art data centre that will transform generated waste heat into energy for the local Docklands community.

“The partnership will see Telehouse West save up to 1,110 tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum. The energy savings will equate to boiling 3,000 kettles continuously” the company stated.

Telehouse announced: “The disposal of waste heat from cooling systems is one of the most significant sustainability issues associated with data storage. This will be the first time a heat export strategy has been introduced in the UK for this type of data centre facility.”

Across the pond, the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing recently placed, as a test, a rack of high-performance computing (HPC) nodes at a local municipal greenhouse to help heat the flowers and plants in the facility. A novel idea.

IBM ‘s new Uitikon center in Switzerland will flow its waste heat through heat exchangers to warm water that will be pumped into the nearby pool. IBM says the volume of heat thrown off by GIB-Services’ data center is enough to warm 80 homes. Or for some lucky swimmers, one pool.

Projects like those undertaken by Telehouse, The University of Notre Dame and IBM, are fantastic examples of how, with a little effort and a lot of global pressure, natural resources can be saved in the most imaginative ways. Computers are here to stay but we need more companies and individuals to think laterally and look at daily processes, analyse the way we do things, and realise that one man’s problem may well be another man’s solution.

What will the future hold? Will this lead to multi-function spaces? Businesses helping each other out in unique ways? Data storage facilities create large amounts of heat as a by-product and at Bikram yoga centres they use this valuable resource to generate the heat required. Seems like a match made in heaven. Watch this space - you may be working out in a computer server room soon.

Credit: Chris Brandon