Remember the utter lunacy of Yahoo's toasty datacenters? Well, now InternetNews' Andy Patrizio clues us into another discovery, this time by Intel: outside air!

The thought of all that largely unprocessed atmosphere touching your systems may give you the heebie-jeebies, but the fears are unfounded says Intel. Oh, and did I mention that the datacenter they used in this experiment was in New Mexico? A dry heat, but still...

With the economizer instead of air conditioning, the power draw was reduced from 111.78 kilowatts to 28.6 kilowatts, a 74 percent reduction in energy consumption. The server failure rate was 4.46 percent, not much worse than the 3.83 percent with air conditioning.

Based on that 74 percent decrease in power consumption, and being able to use air economizers for 91 percent of the year (weather conditions permitting), Intel estimates it could save approximately 67 percent of the total power used annually for cooling. That would translate into $143,000 for a small 500-kilowatt datacenter, or $2.87 million for a 10-megawatt datacenter.

There's also mention of Sun going to the depths of the earth in Japan to keep a datacenter cool.