Nerdalize’s two main products, The CloudHeater and Nerdalize Kompute, provide free heating for home owners and computing power for homeowners in the Netherlands that is reportedly 30-55% cheaper per job than the next best alternative.

By placing servers in residential homes and then selling the computing power to researchers and businesses (users of Infrastructure as a Service), the electricity used by the servers is paid for by Nerdalize. Nerdalize Kompute, a Cloud computing platform, allows clients of Nerdalize to utilize CloudHeater computing power without the overhead and cost of a traditional Cloud service or data center.

Eric Feliksik, director of the Cloud Orchestra at Nerdalize, explained to theCUBE’s Jeff Frick and Brian Gracely at DockerCon 2015 in San Francisco that within their market, Nerdalize is “competing on price,” however the “combination of two things” make the pricing competition easy.

How it works

Nerdalize built a radiator that can actually contain Xeon-based server motherboards and then physically placed these motherboards in the heaters. It then distributed these heaters throughout the Netherlands.

“They compose together a massive computational infrastructure,” Feliksik said. The device is a “heater for one side of the market and a cooler for us; so we can offer computation for other parties.”

Aside from the competitive pricing, Nerdalize is also a conservationist company. Feliksik asserted that 40% of energy in Europe is used for heating, almost all with heavy pollution. The effort to cool data centers is a process that has led to the “data center market now using 5% of the worldwide energy – electricity,” which is “100% converted to heat.”

Nerdalize is “solving this problem by combining these models and cutting a lot back on the infrastructural process. Average efficiency for data centers is 1.7,” which translates to 70% “on top of the regular energy you you use for your server,” Feliksik said. He also stated that market leaders are at 20%, but Nerdalize surpasses that figure with their “innovative” solution. Currently, “we’re at six percent” loss, he said.

The company has been around for three year, and consists of 12 staff.

Being bold and radical

“We want to be bold. We want to be radical,” Feliksik stated. To that end, Nerdalize is partnering with Eneco, the second-largest heating provider in the Netherlands.

According to Feliksik, Nerdalize got its start when its CEO broke his thermostat and huddled under a blanket with his laptop for warmth. The CEO said, “We’ll order a hundred of these and then we’ll have nerd heat,” hence the origin of their name.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of DockerCon.