Data furnaces provide Internet and warm heat, if you live in
Source: Ronald Chavez

A Dutch company is offering those with a fiber-optic internet connection free heating for life.

Nerdalize is installing data furnaces in the Netherlands and running their cloud computing business directly from them, according to Ars Technica UK.

Data furnaces are an inventive way to kill two birds with one stone. Data centers are normally huge and full of rows of large, metallic servers that need to be cooled. They're normally used to store information for cloud services. Instead of storing all those servers in one place, Nerdalize is spreading them out to people's homes.

The servers still compute and deliver data, but it's done over the home's fiber optic network. At the same time, the server generates about 1000 watts of free heat, about enough for a small room, saves money on traditional heating and reduces the impact on the environment.

This has benefits for Nerdalize too. Companies typically invest in expensive cooling systems for their servers, and sending the machines to people's houses cuts down those costs.




Once installed, the data furnace can heat a small room.

The server itself is called the eRadiator, and it hooks up to the wall. It's white and it's bulky, but slopes in, giving it a futuristic look. Unlike conventional heaters, it's silent. It takes about an hour for the data furnace to heat up, and will only provide enough heat for a small room.

Data furnaces are not without trade-offs. The quality of Nerdalize's network isn't as good as it could be with a traditional data center. And if a user doesn't pay their internet bill, the server could turn off. Nerdalize says its customers could pay up to 55 percent less than they would by using traditional servers.

This is another tactic tech companies are using to grapple with what to do with unwieldy and proliferating data centers. Mostly, they've focused on making them sustainable. Both Apple and Google have spent billions on renewable energy systems for their plants.