I have been blogging about water issues in the data center for a while, and have a category for tagging posts for “water.”

It was good to see so many speakers bring up water as the next big issue, not because of cost, but due to supply issues. As Ken Brill presented the view Green is overhyped and money is the issue for driving data center. The cost of water will not drive some of the methods Google used to reduce its water use as water is artificially price constrained in many areas. But, when you do a risk analysis of the water supply, you quickly realize the probability of a water shortage shutting your data center down is something you need to address.

Andrew Fanara started off bringing up water issues as the next big issue in data centers.

James Hamilton presented water use numbers for cooling systems.

In the Best Practices Q&A with Ken Brill, James Hamilton, Olivier Sanche, and Bill Tschudi, water came up again.

Then Google’s green guy Bill Weihl and Joe Kava presented water issues Google has looked at for data centers.

Here are a few slides from Joe’s presentation. Joe specifically brought up the issue James’s numbers were too low, because the amount of water used by power generation is higher than the amount of water used by cooling systems.

Then there was a video on how Google’s data center is getting water from the below canal.