German TV streaming provider moves servers inside wind turbine

Zattoo collaborates with German wind turbine innovator on server migration

One of Europe’s leading TV streaming providers has shifted its IT infrastructure into the bowels of a wind turbine in a pioneering project testing the concept.

Germany’s Zattoo, a platform used by over 3 million users a month, worked with wind energy innovator on WestfalenWIND on the migration, which is now live and handling millions of gigabytes of content delivery.

WestfalenWIND, based in the city of Paderborn, primarily operators and manages a 170-strong wind turbine portfolio which has a total installed capacity of 350 MW.

More recently, the German company spotted an opportunity to collaborate with IT providers with windCORES, a patented project that seeks to install climate-neutral data centres within wind turbines and that was awarded the German Data Centre prize in 2019.

The model provides somewhat of a win-win for would-be users —  Zattoo is using green electricity from wind energy for the distribution of TV content while also locating the data centre directly where the electricity is generated.

“With windCORES, the wind turbines are put to further sustainable use. In this way, we can reconcile the rising demand for energy due to increasing digitalisation with the energy transition,” says Fiete Dubberke, Managing Director IT at WestfalenWIND.

Zattoo migrated its first servers into the wind turbine at WestfalenWIND at the end of last year for testing. As of this week this initial batch is now fully operational.

In the next phase of the project, Zattoo will test if windCORES meets its stability and standards requirements before gradually rolling out more servers. If all goes well Zattoo plans to make the wind turbine its primary data centre location.

“The idea of bringing computing capacity closer to clean energy production while using unused space capacity is so simple and obvious and, from our point of view, a project that will hopefully set a precedent,” said Stefan Lietsch, Chief Technology Officer at Zattoo and responsible for the project.

“We want to consistently become a sustainable company and encourage others to join in.”