According to the article “Some of Google's Secret to Success,” in ITBusinessedge.com from July, 2007, Google started with racks of motherboards, mounted four to a shelf on corkboard, with cheap generic hard drives densely packed together like “blade servers before there were blade servers,” according to one Google executive. Today, they can send prefabricated datacenters anywhere in the world by packing them into standard 20- or 40-foot shipping containers. In fact, last year they received a patent for the concept called “Modular Data Centers,” something they applied for back in 2003 despite possible prior art.

At a January, 2008, dinner meeting for the Winnipeg section of the Canadian Information Processing Society, speaker Stephen Kleynhans, Vice President Research at Gartner Inc.,  the leading IT research and advisory firm in the US, said that Google needed access to power and cooling and that there are also unsubstantiated discussions going around that they are considering locating server farms up north to take advantage of the cooler temperatures. Also, data transmission does not diminish over long distances on power lines, but power does.  The power bill will be lower if you build the server farms up north where it’s naturally colder instead of concentrating on power sources like hydro dams or wind farms.   The existing power lines can be used to move the data to major communication hubs.

A few years ago, the idea of utilizing power lines to bring broadband Internet to rural populations in the U.S. with the downside of conflicts with amateur radio transmissions was developed. There’s little information about this concept that can be Googled, but one has to wonder if the Internet giant will open datacenters in Manitoba’s north someday. The Canadian province has the hydro lines, northern populations to serve as potential employees, and an abundance of colder than average daily ambient weather.