Would you heat your home with a data furnace?
Data centers give off heat, a lot of it. At least half the cost of a data center is the cost to cool the servers. With all of that heat going to waste, researchers at the University of Virginia and Microsoft Research wrote a paper suggesting that data centers broken down into data furnaces would make great whole house heaters and still save corporations money.
According to The New York Times, the paper, The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing was presented at a recent Usenix conference. Basically, your home could become a mini data center with one to three cabinets of servers hooked up to your heating fans and duct work…

