German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/11/cloud_heat_is_putting_servers_in_homes_and_offices_and_the_heat_from_them.html

by throwaway_yy2Di • 12 years ago

171 83 12 years ago

slate.com

marknadal• 12 years ago

This is hilarious and great marketing, despite the fact I hate ads! Well done.

hollerith• 12 years ago

You seem to think that this is a publicity stunt (rather than a sincere offer of heating services).

I don't think it is.

_stephan• 12 years ago

Ignoring 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.

buro9• 12 years ago

Do we get to turn the servers off in the summer when there is a heatwave?

DanBC2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

There'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?

xwintermutex• 12 years ago

Reminds me of a Dutch startup that is doing about the same: http://nerdalize.com/

mappu• 12 years ago

No mention of how noisy rack servers can be?

return0• 12 years ago

i wonder if any big data centers do something similar to heat nearby cities?

throwaway_yy2Di• 12 years ago

I'm sure there's a few -- the technical term you want is "district heating". I.e.,

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-...

    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."

yc10102• 12 years ago

What about the noise? Servers can be extremely noisy, in a home environment they would drive the occupier insane (well unless they are deaf)

aaron6952• 12 years ago

Heat pump heating is loud too, but people make it work.

It doesn't have to be inside.

trvz• 12 years ago

Reading 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• 12 years ago

My furnace is pretty loud. I find it to be comforting.

yc10102• 12 years ago

I 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

mikkom• 12 years ago

Doesn't sound very secure to be but if it's just public web sites that are mirrored on multiple locations it might sound reasonable..

reduce2• 12 years ago

So 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__• 12 years ago

This 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.

reduce2• 12 years ago

Very 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.

shitehawk• 12 years ago

This is not possible here in Germany.

You sure about that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8601577

thraxil2• 12 years 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.

justinsb4• 12 years ago

Rather 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.

valarauca12• 12 years ago

This 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.

thraxil2• 12 years ago

It means that at best, they've reduced the problem to safe cracking. And it's a "safe" that has to have channels for power, data, and hot water/air to go in and out and sits unguarded in the potential attacker's house for as long as they need.

No safe is "uncrackable", they just get rated at how much time/expense it would take a pro to break in and then you don't store anything in it that's more valuable than that.

If I'm a potential customer looking to process my data on these servers, I would want to know what the equivalent rating is.

tadpoleonenter• 12 years ago

What about insurance? Fire? Theft?

sesqu2• 12 years ago

The initial setup fee covers fireproofing and insurance.

kriro• 12 years ago

They 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)?

johnbaum19682• 12 years 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

iancarroll• 12 years ago

Which 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.

junto• 12 years ago

Isn'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-m...

Tepix• 12 years ago

You need to pay 12,000€ up front for 15 years of heating. Unless they go bankrupt of course...

johnbaum19682• 12 years ago

That 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• 12 years ago

Well that's a non-starter.

cfstras• 12 years ago

The 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.

drivingmenuts2• 12 years ago

If they go bankrupt, hey, free box!

hrnnnnnn• 12 years ago

Excerpts 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."

mhurron• 12 years ago

It's good to see a contract written in clear, understandable language.

S_A_P• 12 years ago

Who says Germans have no sense of humor????

to3m• 12 years ago

Who says they do...

dmix• 12 years ago

If HN had a bitcoin tip system, I would have most definitely have given it to you.

sauere• 12 years 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.

justinsb4• 12 years ago

What 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• 12 years ago

They'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.

ion201• 12 years ago

Care to elaborate about that? I don't see the security concern if the data is encrypted on disk and both ways over the network. I doubt they would just leave the private keys to hang out on the server for anyone to take.

Xylakant6• 12 years ago

There's a lot of data where that kind of security is acceptable, for example all the video content on youtube. You don't want random people to tampler with it, but it's not high security.

I wouldn't want my bank to store my account data on one of those, but I wouldn't mind if website assets were served from there.

nacs• 12 years ago

for example all the video content on youtube

Well not all video content as Youtube allows for private (and unlisted) videos.

Retric• 12 years ago

Depends on usage patterns.

If there simply storing encrypted data then these servers might be unable to decrypt the stored information and reading their contents would be pointless.

If on the other hand these servers decrypt the data then encryption is of limited value.

jqm• 12 years ago

I wish I could sign up for this. I still use dial up. Is that going to be a problem?

toxican• 12 years ago

Not in '96 it won't be!

kordless3• 12 years ago

I just signed up.

justinsb4• 12 years ago

I 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.

Xylakant6• 12 years ago

Distributed 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• 12 years ago

Munich - 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• 12 years ago

virtual drug mules

kordless3• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

So.. who is going to cool these in the summer?

comrade1• 12 years ago

At least we can now stop sleeping with the livestock.

(I'm purposely not addressing sex with the livestock)

drivingmenuts2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

I 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.

German Cloud Company Offering Free Heat If You Have Room for Some of Its Servers

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