Nerdalize thinks differently about implementing the cloud

I can still remember the day, many years ago, when I was working through a problem with my boss at Oracle. At one point he stopped, and simply said "David, one of the things I like about working with you is you think in a completely different way to me."  Perhaps that moment stuck with me because I too am delighted by people who think thoughts that can turn a whole way of doing business on its head.

That's why this week I was so delighted to read about Nerdalize.  My belief is that the cloud is a critical piece of infrastructure for the industrial Internet of things.  While I think the cloud is inevitable, it does face some challenges. Many CIOs are concerned about data security, for example. What is less well known is the staggering electricity consumption - and waste. It's been estimated that as much as 2% of global electricity production is used to power and cool cloud server farms.  Centralizing servers that way may be more efficient than having many smaller data centers, but cooling becomes a much bigger problem. 

Nerdalize flipped the problem on its head.  It is renting cloud servers to consumers in the Netherlands - the difference is the servers are cunningly disguised as 1kW home heaters!  So instead of a massive data center with a humongous heat problem - heat that is typically just dumped into the atmosphere - Nerdalize disperses the servers and usefully dumps the heat into people's homes.  Love it!

To be fair, Nerdalize isn't the first company to propose this.  But, its solution does look a lot more elegant, scalable, and affordable than this one.  There are still many unknowns and questions:

• How many homes have the right climate for this approach?
• How much difference will 1kW make to a home?
• What happens in the summer when you don't need the heat?
• And, oh err, security.  Cloud data centers are famous for their robust physical security, using biometrics for identification and authentication, for example.  So that 1Kw heater had better be pretty darn tamper-proof…..

Ultimately of course, the market will judge, but top-marks for out of the box thinking.