We Have Water, You Have a Server Farm — Let’s Get Together

A moderately dull piece reprinted at WaterWorld.com (not the movie) talks about folks in Milwaukee who are considering asking Google, Yahoo!, or MSN to build a server farm in their town.   That seems cool.

Apparently a server farm — housing all your gmail, etc. as well as bouncing info instantly about the globe — uses as much as 360,000 gallons of water a day.  All to keep your searches fast and your contacts coolly intact.   Tens of thousands of servers kick off a lot of heat.

So the idea would be for Google to build a server farm in an abandoned factory or something.  Milwaukee provides the water, cheaply, and potentially  even more cheaply under a program called WAVE  (Water Attracting Valued Employers, not the Google platform).  And Google brings in money and jobs.  That seems cool too, although I won’t venture whether the Milwaukonomy would actually benefit from the influx.

I only stumbled on this story because I thought it was about Waterworld, the movie.  I actually like that movie, and I’m not alone.  But the really cool thing I found link-chasing is this article from RoughType.com presenting all sorts of interesting details about Google’s data farms and servers.   Check it out.   It’s geeky bliss.  They were leasing their servers until 2005!  All that data!