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German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers
- marknadal 12y agoThis is hilarious and great marketing, despite the fact I hate ads! Well done.
- hollerith 12y agoYou seem to think that this is a publicity stunt (rather than a sincere offer of heating services). I don't think it is.
- _stephan 12y agoIgnoring the technical difficulty of actually using the excess heat for reliably and consistently heating a building, it's hard to believe that the economics of connecting and servicing single cabinets randomly located all over the landscape could work out.
- aaron695 12y ago> that the economics of connecting and servicing single cabinets randomly located all over the landscape I kinda thought the same. But assuming it can be properly encrypted (hard) what's the difference to swapping in a new server compared to swapping in a new gas bottle? User pays for the initial infrastructure. Pull the old one out, pop the new one in, 60 seconds, any blue collar worker can do it, if it's setup properly. It would even be automatically checked remotely it was done 100% correctly. Once every 3 years? Probably cost $50 a pop? Not necessarily crazy.
- sesqu 12y agoThey say they do a maintenance check once a year, and replace the server every 3-5 years. Half an hour or so, at the company's expense.
- pcrh 12y agoMaybe they're hoping that their biggest customers will be office buildings that have space to spare. Each building could house a fair number of servers.
- a3n 12y agoThat could make sense, especially if those office buildings have backup generators. As it is, I've lived in a nice neighborhood that every winter had at least one or two power outages lasting at least a day or two.
- buro9 12y agoDo we get to turn the servers off in the summer when there is a heatwave?
- DanBC 12y ago> If the servers do heavy data processing when no one needs the heat, the system stores hot water in a “buffering tank.” And the Cloud&Heat cabinets can also vent outside in the spring and summer.
- smoyer 12y agoThere's a limit to that buffering ... and if they can vent outside in the Spring and Summer, wouldn't that be even more efficient in the Winter?
- DanBC 12y agoI've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful. This scheme takes hot air and either gives it some use - heating a room - or dumps it. Burying pipes to get heat from the ground is quite popular. This is just a version of that. I'm not sure it's as bad as the "green washing" that many companies do.
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoIt's at least useful as the input to a heat exchanger.
- chrisseaton 12y ago> I've always found it odd that heat from servers is hot enough to be a problem but not hot enough to be useful. I've always wondered the same thing about cooling towers in power stations. Why are they cooling the water coming out of the plant? The whole point of the plant is to make it hot and then convert that to electricity - why on earth are they venting the energy like that? Apparently it's to do with cooling it fast enough to create a vacuum to draw through more water.
- mikkom 12y agoDoesn't sound very secure to be but if it's just public web sites that are mirrored on multiple locations it might sound reasonable..
- xwintermutex 12y agoReminds me of a Dutch startup that is doing about the same: http://nerdalize.com/ http://nerdalize.com/
- mappu 12y agoNo mention of how noisy rack servers can be?
- return0 12y agoi wonder if any big data centers do something similar to heat nearby cities?
- throwaway_yy2Di 12y agoI'm sure there's a few -- the technical term you want is "district heating". I.e., http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024952673_amazonheatxml.html http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024952673_amazonheat... "Partnering with other companies, Amazon will use waste heat from a data center in a Seattle skyscraper to warm its soaring new Denny Triangle campus across the street." http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-data-centre-heat-homes http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/helsinki-... Helsinki data centre to heat homes "A mini revolution in eco-friendly computing is taking place in the depths of the 19th-century Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral in downtown Helsinki." "The Finnish IT company Academica has installed a new 2MW database server centre in an empty second world war bomb shelter meant to protect city officials in the event of a Russian attack. Water warmed while cooling the servers will go on to provide heat for 500 homes or 1,000 flats in a city that often suffers winters of -20C. After the heat is extracted, the water will be recycled back to cool the servers again."
- yc1010 12y agoWhat about the noise? Servers can be extremely noisy, in a home environment they would drive the occupier insane (well unless they are deaf)
- aaron695 12y agoHeat pump heating is loud too, but people make it work. It doesn't have to be inside.
- trvz 12y agoReading C&H's site, I think the living room reference in the article is false. The rack is supposed to be in the basement to add heat to your water heating system.
- adam12 12y agoMy furnace is pretty loud. I find it to be comforting.
- yc1010 12y agoI regularly construct/test/burnin Supermicro servers here in home office before sending them off for collocation The noise is something else from just one server with the fans being especially annoying In a datacenter environment a single rack makes a mighty annoying noise and vibrations. I would not want to be living anywhere near a rack lol
- reduce 12y agoSo now what happens when law enforcement shows up to the hosting company and tells them they're raiding some servers? Will this be seen as a way to impede and slow down large scale raids?
- k__ 12y agoThis is not possible here in germany. Even if they want to "raid" my flat-mate, they can't go to my rooms while doing it.
- reduce 12y agoVery interesting. I bet that will be a big selling point for people considering this hosting service. Seems that it will be harder to put pressure on hundreds of individual residents, than it is to do so to a big centralized datacenter provider company.
- nhaehnle 12y agoRealistically speaking, I suspect that if this does take off (and it is a very cool idea), they won't actually install those things in living rooms due to noise concerns. Those racks are going to be in the basement where the other heating equipment typically is. So police are going to get a warrant that is limited to the basement room containing the racks. the home owners will be slightly annoyed and inconvenienced, but they aren't going to put up a fight against the warrant. They'll be more than happy to cooperate with the police.
- innguest 12y agoScroll up a bit and you will see this comment: > Ladies and Gentlemen, i present: Bullshit. I wish companies with no clue about encryption would stop making these insane claims. Which is rude and does not make a cogent argument, and yet 3 people asked for clarification instead of downvoting it. The (lack of a) downvoting policy here is abysmal and no one wants to talk about it.
- shitehawk 12y ago>This is not possible here in Germany. You sure about that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8601577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8601577
- thraxil 12y ago> Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that everyone’s information is safe. Unless they've cracked the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption, that data is still going to be unencrypted at some point in those units and vulnerable if the physical security of the cabinet is compromised.
- justinsb 12y agoRather than cracking the problem of practical fully homomorphic encryption, I think they're probably cracked the problem of deleting the keys when the physical security of the cabinet is compromised.
- valarauca1 12y agoThis doesn't solve the problem. Unless the cabinet is air tight, and uses a pressure sensor to detect itself being opened. It's "Is the cabinet open?" subroutine can be defeated by simply opening the cabinet where a sensor isn't located. Basically cut the sucker open on the side. :.:.: Also by using a time sharing OS its likely you can induce a large network based load externally slowing its IO speed to the level you can open the cabinet, and "close" the cabinet from the sensors perspective while leaving it opened. :.:.: Further more data loss doesn't occur on door opening, thus the keys are still recoverable, because without it would be impossible to service.
- Xylakant 12y agoA possible approach would be: keep the data encrypted, just decrypt it at the endpoint. Tarsnap for example does that. Or keep the keys on servers that are acting as proxies and decrypt the data. Or actually loose all data on door opening. Just drop it and use a replication like backblaze and S3 use. A harddrive lost? Allocate a shard somewhere else. A unit looses enough harddrives to require service? Just pull it, trash it, plug in a new one. Given that the units are spread out further than servers in a datacenter, you probably want that anyways. Your service teams don't want coordinate access to the device, drive there and the homeowner does not show up for something as mundane as an HDD swap.
- tadpoleonenter 12y agoWhat about insurance? Fire? Theft?
- sesqu 12y agoThe initial setup fee covers fireproofing and insurance.
- kriro 12y agoThey only mention that the company pays for the internet service but I'd assume traffic/speed from a home could also be an issue. I mean the average home network connections aren't exactly amazing so what can be hosted on these servers (I doubt it's cost efficient to provide new infrastructure for every home)?
- johnbaum1968 12y ago> A prerequisite for the use of Cloud&Heat is [...] an Internet connection of at least 50 Mbit/s https://www.cloudandheat.com/en/index.html#heat-three https://www.cloudandheat.com/en/index.html#heat-three
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- iancarroll 12y agoWhich is contradicted by the last FAQ: > Cloud&Heat sets up a separate Internet connection for server operation and bears all costs of this as well as liability for any damage.
- mikeash 12y agoMaybe they mean the ability to obtain a 50Mbps connection?
- junto 12y agoIsn't residential DSL and cable a shared pipe, thus if they are using saturating that 50mbit pipe 24/7/365 then your own DSL/cable connection could be considerably worse? http://www.speedguide.net/faq/is-dsl-dedicated-while-cable-modems-shared-bandwidth-136 http://www.speedguide.net/faq/is-dsl-dedicated-while-cable-m...
- Tepix 12y agoYou need to pay 12,000€ up front for 15 years of heating. Unless they go bankrupt of course...
- johnbaum1968 12y agoThat is my major concern. I live in a fairly new average sized house in Germany with a modern heating system (heating pump) and pay about 1200€/year for heating. If I knew for sure that they exist in 15 years I would really consider it.
- pjc50 12y agoWell that's a non-starter.
- cfstras 12y agoThe question would be what the safeties are you get for the 12K. If the cabinet is, you wouldn't have to fear a lot of damages from a bankrupt.
- drivingmenuts 12y agoIf they go bankrupt, hey, free box!
- hrnnnnnn 12y agoExcerpts from the contract: "We install The Device in your house, free of charge. You receive heat. Do not ask about the function of The Device." "You may hear a human voice coming from inside The Device. Ignore it." "Some customers report having recurring dreams about The Device, this is normal." "The Device comes in one colour: Impenetrable Blackness." "Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it."
- sauere 12y ago> Security is a concern with these setups, because anyone’s data could be in anyone else’s house at a given time, but Cloud&Heat claims that since all of its data is encrypted and only its employees can open the cabinets that everyone’s information is safe. Ladies and Gentlemen, i present: Bullshit. I wish companies with no clue about encryption would stop making these insane claims.
- justinsb 12y agoWhat is the attack you're envisaging? Presumably they detect unauthorized case-intrusion and immediately delete the keys. This isn't foolproof, but it's probably good enough to stop anyone except the people that are going to get the data no matter what you do.
- vertex-four 12y agoThey'd need to immediately shut down their server as well (as in immediately, as in crash), and even that's not necessarily enough to remove data from RAM before attackers can get to it.
- Xylakant 12y agoThe threat scenario is a bit far fetched. First you'd need to find out where an individual, interesting piece of data is stored. Then you have to break into this building, break open the cabinet and freeze the RAM fast enough to preserve the memory content. That's obviously something that can be done, but it requires a lot of dedication to pull of, so that's something you'd only do in case where you know the data is valuable. It's probably easier to just get an inside job done, but you could get that at any other datacenter or even at AWS. For a lot of data, the payoff is not worth the effort and risk, so I'd be unconcerned. Obviously, don't store bank accounts or medical data there, don't use it for the next NSA datacenter etc.
- owenmarshall 12y agoOr freeze the entire cabinet in situ and pick through the RAM at your leisure. But yeah, you're right - this isn't gonna happen. I'd worry more about a home below floodplain taking on water.
- jqm 12y agoI wish I could sign up for this. I still use dial up. Is that going to be a problem?
- justinsb 12y agoI think distributed backup (of encrypted files) could be a great use case. But (like the CDN case mentioned elsewhere) this is also more demanding of bandwidth than CPU, which isn't really what you want here if your goal is to produce heat. Distributed rendering of video content could maybe be a good use case - moderate bandwidth requirements, heavy CPU/GPU utilization, data not overly sensitive.
- Xylakant 12y agoDistributed backup is actually a good case. It's usually bandwith taxing in terms of upload speed and most internet connections in Germany are asymmetric in favor of download speed (which would be the right direction if the server is in your home). My connection has 50MBit/sec download and only 8 Mbit/sec upload.
- ntaso 12y agoMunich - In the night of Saturday to Sunday, a special unit of the police raided the home of retired gardener Heinz S. to seize several cloud computers. Heinz S. allegedly participated as a volunteer to hide Piratecloud servers in Germany. "I just wanted some heat from the thing, I don’t even know what it really is", is the unlikely claim of Heinz S., who turned 76 this year. On Tuesday, he has to state his case in court, together with 22 other people who surprisingly tell a very similar story.
- bengali3 12y agovirtual drug mules
- kordless 12y ago> Still, it's more reassuring to think that your data is stored in a remote server farm than in someone’s house. That depends entirely on your use cases. Making comments like this without mentioning the wide range of trust levels with different use cases is short sighted.
- siddarthd2919 12y agoSo.. who is going to cool these in the summer?
- comrade1 12y agoAt least we can now stop sleeping with the livestock. (I'm purposely not addressing sex with the livestock)
- drivingmenuts 12y ago"So, you'd like a CloudenHeatenDevicenGlaven in your haus, ja?" "Yep." "That ... does not sound German to me." "Yeah, well, ... " "I think you are a spy. Looking to take advantage of our generosity, ja? Und maybe in ze middle of the nacht you installen the spying thing on our box, mit your little NSA spying thing?" "Haha! Those don't exist. The NSA? That actually stands for No Such Agency, dude. I mean, freund ... fraud ... you know, ich bin ein jelly donut and all that." "You are sure you are not this spy?" "Yep, er ... ja."
- api 12y agoI could see actually this working at a larger scale -- e.g. put a server room in the basement of a low-income housing project in a place with cold winters like Chicago or Toronto and heat the building with waste heat during the chilly months. It'd also be worth it at that scale to wire the building for multi-homed fiber. Can't see it being practical at small house scale, and there's also some big security issues.