JeremyData centers are one of the biggest problems today in the world of green computing. Power hungry, wasteful, sprawling, expensive...they're just plain bad on any number of metrics. But they're essential to operating a business today. Big companies have giant off-site data centers, while smaller companies rent space if they can't afford to operate their own. Most companies work with them in some way.

Problem is, PCs and servers guzzle power, and generate a fair amount of heat. One computer under your desktop isn't a big problem, but stack hundreds or thousands of them side by side--and run them 24/7--and you'll see power consumption and heat can go way up. Data centers have specially designed HVAC systems to cool those computers, but the escalation of storage needs over the past few years means server creep has been outpacing the ability of IT managers to keep things cool. The costs of running these facilities has been spiraling out of control as well: Nearly 50 cents of every dollar of computer hardware is spent on energy, according to IDC Research. What to do?

Dealing with these data centers has been a central topic of discussion for a while now. Take for example IBM's important Project Big Green, announced back in May, a billion dollar investment in green technologies to help cool and cheapen data centers. The company suggests a five step plan:

1. Diagnose: Evaluate existing facilities--energy assessment, virtual 3-D power management, and thermal analytics.
2. Build: Plan, build, or update to an energy efficient data center.
3. Virtualize: Virtualize IT infrastructures and special purpose processors.
4. Manage: Seize control with power management software.
5. Cool: Exploit liquid cooling solutions--inside and out of the data center.

Virtualization is a key technology for sure, and should go a long way towards reducing the footprint of a data center, by reducing the number of servers needed. And sure, I agree that there are some very real steps one can take today to improve the layout, both physically and thermally, of most of these facilities.

But I'm intrigued by the potential of a new concept from AMILabs, a research division of Applied Methodologies Inc.--not to be confused with American Megatrends Inc., which makes the AMI BIOS that powers about half the world's desktop computers. AMILabs asks the following intriguing question:

"What if it were possible to reprocess the waste thermal energy generated from servers, routers, switches, and other data center computing devices and convert it into usable free energy? Plus at the same time not adversely affect the current cooling and thermal environment of the device? An industry maxim states that in most data centers, for each Kwh of energy consumed by a server roughly another Kwh is used up to cool it. AMILABS has successfully lab tested that it is possible to co-generate power at the same time by reprocessing the wasted energy byproducts of various devices."

a thermoelectric moduleThe Green Server Prototype works by harnessing wasted heat using a tiny integrated thermoelectric generator, such as the HZ-2 Thermoelectric Module shown at left from Hi-Z Technology. This little chip uses bismuth telluride semiconductors to convert heat into a small amount of power--no moving parts, in other words. According to the example posted on AMILabs' site, a server or firewall can recycle heat into about 10v, a switch can generate 7v, and a router 5v. Put those together, and a rack with a router, firewall, switch, and five servers can generate 72v of power, which it can then feed back into the power network or store for use later.

There are many ways to solve the data center dilemma. Designing better data centers, building better computers, and taking advantage of the power of virtualization are all giant leaps forward. And they all seem pretty far off and expensive changes to implement. But a simple retrofit kit using this type of technology could prove to be just the sort of simple, low cost stop-gap measure we need right now.