New guy!

Hey everyone, I hope you're doing just fine!

I joined earlier today and I figured it was only appropriate I introduced myself to the community, I believe I will be checking in here quite frequently from here on as I work on a new Project.

I'm 23 years of age and am a self-employed young entrepreneur. I own a small, but quickly growing web hosting company (which will remain nameless, i'm not trying to solicit here nor do I want my plans indexed on Google ). I absolutely love business, and somehow have acquired a natural knack for it. The small company I formed just a little more than a year ago has surpassed what I expected for the first year and we're taking on new clients daily now and growing at a promising rate!

I joined here to do additional research and connect with people who know their alternative construction. My dream is to build an earth-based (likely earthbag) facility for my company in the next couple of years. I'm not stranger to hard work, having volunteered on orchards and farms in my late teens and always helping out in the garden as a kid. I would absolutely LOVE to have a nice, comfortable, "green" office and facility! I say put quotes around 'green' simply because it's hard for a company in my industry to be truly 'green', the energy datacenters consume is tremendous. That's why I want to build a small one from the ground up with efficiency and the environment in mind, trying to please both sides of my interest (nature/earth friendliness VS business/resource-demanding-technology) in the most balanced and, err, 'economical' way.

Anyhow, I just wanted to kind of introduce myself and let you know what i'm all about. I wish to connect with the community and share ideas and learn new things.

Thanks for reading this!

Yours truly,

"Self Made Mad Man"


EDIT:

About the name...

I didn't know what to register as, because I didn't want to use my real name nor my business identity, so I chose "Self Made Mad Man", the title of a short story I wrote in High School. Though, it seems like an appropriate name all things considered.

Greetings,
  I don't post here much anymore, but your introduction led me down an interesting path this morning.
  I don't know much about datacenters, so googled "energy needed to run datacenter" and found this from a Microsoft newsletter.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/apr11/04-19greendatacenters.mspx

Mathematically, PUE is straightforward: Divide the total power consumption for the entire facility by the power consumed by the core IT components – the servers and storage and network equipment. A PUE of 1.5, for examples, means that for every 1 watt of server power, another 0.5 watts is used in overhead power. The industry’s goal should be to drive that ratio as close to 1 as possible, Belady said.

“To get there, Microsoft and the industry must peel away the layers of infrastructure surrounding the servers. They are the main driver of a datacenter’s power consumption, which is huge. Some datacenters can drink as much as 50 megawatts – roughly five percent of what a nuclear power plant generates,” Belady said.

A few years ago, he performed an experiment to show it’s possible to run servers without the surrounding datacenter infrastructure (and achieving a PUE of 1.0). He and an engineering colleague put a rack of servers in a tent outside, just behind one of Microsoft’s datacenters. They ran perfectly for seven months. “That’s an example of making the datacenter infrastructure disappear,” he said.

I know its a Microsoft generated news story but I thought it was quite interesting.

So, if my laptop is any example, a data center must generate a lot of heat.  If you are in a cool climate you could heat a greenhouse on the roof of the datacenter?

Pre-heat a sauna?

Heat living areas adjacent to the datacenter?

Interesting stuff.  Good Luck.

Yes, that's more or less correct. Servers generate a lot of heat, which can be a pain to adequately cool if the infrastructure is designed insufficiently. Also, as you can imagine, it takes a lot of electricity to power hundreds of servers non-stop 24/7. (And then, you need a minimum of n+1 redundancy on all important systems such as networking, power, cooling).

The idea for the datacenter would be something bermed-earth or completely buried, exhausting the heat from all servers into sort of, err, 'hallways' that run on the backside of the servers to isolate the hot/cool side. Cool air to the front of the servers, hot air exhausting through the read into isolated 'halls' where that heat would have to be exhausted further. The original idea was trying to heat the offices (above ground) with the heat generated from the datacenter below, though I do like the idea of heating a garden. I love gardening so that'd be awesome for me, though I'd likely be neglecting my actual duties to be in the greenhouse all day!

"Where'd he go? This was supposed to be done hours ago!"
--"Ah, probably either napping on the green house hammock or turning the compost pile. That hippy owner is going to be the death of this company!"

Haha