Old Barge Finds New Cargo: Big Data

California company Nautilus Data Technologies is building the world's first floating commercial data center at a naval shipyard near San Francisco, and expects to have it ready for use in early 2016.

The prototype vessel was developed in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, and is intended to reduce the high energy costs associated with data center operations.

Cooling the server racks that host everything online – from Netflix to Amazon to the most classified government data – is an energy-intensive and expensive process. Energy costs are so important to data center operators that many choose to locate based on the price and availability of electricity.

Nautilus' design has tested out at very close to the limit on the industry's benchmark for power usage effectiveness (PUE).

On a scale where a lower limit of 1.0 represents ideal efficiency, Google claims an average data center PUE of 1.16. Nautilus says that their prototype has demonstrated values below 1.05. The lower the value, the lower the power bill – and Nautilus claims savings of up to 50% over a typical center.

Even more important in the parched California environment – which is in its fourth year of extreme drought – this barge uses an unlimited supply of salt water for cooling.

The average land-based data center can consume as much as seven million gallons of fresh water a year in its cooling towers, about one third the amount used by a golf course.

The startup has not identified potential customers, but says it is in talks with leading companies and expects to announce contracts in early 2016.

Early supporters include semiconductor supplier Applied Materials, Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, and the U.S. Navy, which has supplied technical advice and material support.

The company says that it has top secret clearance to work on Navy projects, and in addition to civilian use pierside in California, the barge could potentially see portable, worldwide applications for the military.