Biodynamic agriculture concept applied to datacenters

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Reader Joe Williams was inspired by episode 5 of the Green HPC podcast series and got to thinking about how the concept of biodynamic agriculture might be applied to datacenters

To me this totally has an analog in datacenters, server farms (pun intended) and machine rooms. To paraphrase the above wikipedia quote:

An electrodynamic datacenter is one that is treated as a unified and individual organism. That is each datacenter is an autonomous entity and needs to be thought about as an organism where all the components (CRACs, servers, network, power, etc) are balanced and interrelated without external inputs insofar as this is possible given the loss of capacity (bandwidth, compute, storage, etc) due to export of data, compute or another resource.

Putting it like that seems pretty reasonable and would seem to lean toward making datacenters as efficient as possible. The goal being reducing external inputs (power, bandwidth and etc) while still getting the desired amount of output.

More in Joe’s post, which I think provides an interesting conceptual handle for many of the datacenter concepts with which people have begun experimenting. Thanks for the pointer, Joe!