Keeping 'The Cloud' Afloat

In the world now, billions of people are sending messages to each other 24/7 creating a massive amount of data on the "cloud". But what is the cloud and more importantly where is the cloud.

It's easy to imagine data existing in this kind of pseudo magical area supported by the combined force of many users into a cloud of information floating under its own weight, and while it is true that the internet is held up by the combined efforts of many users, the lion's share of the internet is held up by the technological titans, replacing Atlas' muscles with vast server banks. While certainly not limited to, includes Microsoft, Google and Facebook, who all have hundreds of thousands of servers, if not millions now.

These gigantic server farms are now processing countless terabytes of data, using huge amounts of power and sending it all over the world, and some of the technology used in these server farms is quite interesting. You quickly find that thinking about servers in terms of your home computer just doesn't do it justice. These server farms can quite quickly begin to resemble industrial complexes, which is fitting since they are providing industrial computing.

A central cooling plant in Google's Douglas County,
Georgia, data center. Photo: Google/Connie Zhou

One of the biggest issues faced by server farms is the cooling required and how to make it efficient to cool. Depending on the type of server, power consumption can vary greatly, from 50W anywhere up to 5000W for the very high end servers, though the average is generally closer the 250W mark, this doesn't seem so bad until you realise that all of this energy is converted into heat, then suddenly block of 250W servers might closer resemble a 2KW heater. While power consumption has been coming down, especially in recent years, when you have rooms full of these, the required cooling can be quite extreme and this has led to a number of industrial scaled solutions.

The easiest to implement though not the most efficient is to cool the whole building with very powerful air conditioning units and then rely on the internal fans in the servers to cool the key components. While effective this does have the downside of requiring a lot of extra power consumption.

An interesting alternative to this has been liquid cooling, again not really anything like you might see in a home, this relies on submerging the whole servers into a non-conductive liquid and then centrally cooling and pumping the liquid, which makes the process a lot more efficient. This method also has the added benefit of increased thermal conductivity, since compared to gasses, liquids have much better thermal properties, which typically results in better cooling for all components on the server, rather than just the main heat producing elements, which can increase the lifespan of devices.

In either case, what tends to result from these installations is room and rooms of servers with other areas totally dedicated to the removal of heat, and it's in these massive leviathans that the cloud we all rely on is supported.