Iceland will keep your servers cool
Hoping to heat up its economy again after the fall of its biggest banks, Iceland is embarking on a new innovation: data farming. Stephen Beard explores why this idea works and is actually kind of cool.
Willy Torsteinsson of Verne Global, Iceland's first server farm, at the vacant warehouse that will store everything. (Stephen Beard)
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TEXT OF STORY
Renita Jablonski: How about a new business idea from Iceland? After its biggest banks collapsed last October, investors may be wary. But the island's latest plan has nothing to do with high finance. Alongside its fishing, the country wants to take up . . . data farming. From Reykjavik, Stephen Beard filed this report.
Stephen Beard: After the calamitous excursion into global banking, Iceland has a new message for the world: send us your computer servers and we'll keep them cool.
Behind this electronic door lie several acres of empty space. It's a vacant warehouse in a former U.S. Navy base. Now, Willy Torsteinsson wants to fill it with computers.
Willy Torsteinsson: Well, this is it. This is our data center. This is the warehouse that we are converting for our servers.
Willy runs Verne Global, Iceland's first server farm. He's hoping to persuade some of the biggest companies that operate on the Internet to base their servers here. Iceland's low temperatures are an attraction:
Torsteinsson: Because we don't have to spend a lot of electricity cooling the computers down once we have actually run them.
Beard: All you have to do then is just open the doors and let the wind blow through.
Torsteinsson: Yeah, basically that's pretty much it.
Iceland has another advantage: a reliable supply of low-cost electricity to run the servers. That power is generated by glacial run-off and by hot water and steam piped up from beneath the Earth's crust.
It's plentiful power, says Gudni Johannesson of the National Energy Authority:
Gudni Johannesson: We are producing electricity five times more than we need for our own normal, domestic use. So we have a lot more to give of renewable energy.
Iceland's electricity is carbon-free. That's another reason why companies should place their servers here, says Thor Bjorgolffson, owner of Verne Global. He says power-hungry data centers using carbon-fired electricity are very polluting:
Thor Bjorgolffson: By the year 2020, data centers will be a bigger carbon emitter than the airline industry. And certainly, people can see more regulation coming online in terms of carbon emissions.
Bjorgolffson is controversial. He owned a chunk of one of the banks that went bust last fall. No way will his server farm repair that financial damage. But, say his supporters, it's the kind of clean, green business that might help restore Iceland's tarnished image abroad.
In Reykjavik, this is Stephen Beard for Marketplace.
Comments
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From Reykjavík, 03/30/2009
There will be 3 good submarine cables connecting Iceland. As mentioned by Mr. Olafur Tryggvason, they are Danice, Farice and Tele Greenland. With these cables in place you do not need the satellite as a backup. You will have cables both to Europe and N-America via Greenland. The prices will be competitive to other transatlantic submarine cables. If you need more detailed information please contact me through my e-mail; einar@invest.is Invest in Iceland Agency is an agency of the Ministry of Industry and the Trade Council of Iceland.
From Lawrence, KS, 03/29/2009
I wonder if the concerns of latency might be addressed by having the application layer closer to the user and the database living in Iceland? This assumes the common 3 layer approach, client, application server, database server.
From Los Angeles, CA, 03/29/2009
What is the backup if these servers are affected by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions?
From IL, 03/27/2009
Wales,
Satellite links are great -- but the speed of light (traveling 42 million kilometers out a geosynchronous satellite, and then back) guarantees that the network latency will be greater than 280 milliseconds, or 0.280 seconds.
That doesn't sound like much, but I just checked the latency from where I'm sitting to the nearest Google server is just under 15 milliseconds. Also, a back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests that if I'm typing at 60 words per minute, I hit a key every 200 milliseconds or so, I'd be able to notice the lag in many applications -- and remote server administration tools are notorious for being affected by latency. Video games, too. And the negotiation of encrypted sessions for https pages are disproportionately affected by latency, because of the cryptographic dance required to exchange the keys securely.
Satellite connections are wonderfully useful, but the big cables that Olafur Tryggvason mentions really are the first thing I'd look at if I were going to co-locate a server in a far-away place. Olafur, do any of the cable systems that you mention connect to large POPs in the US and/or mainland Europe?
Another thing that I would look at are laws regarding encryption and privacy. The US has some strange rules about exporting encryption technology. These laws are interpreted so that they don't really interfere with industry-best-practices, but I'd have to check to make sure that both US laws and Icelandic don't pose a problem. This is especially significant, since the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards in the US require credit card processors require encryption in some cases. I'm sure that if there are any issues here that they will be hashed out, but these are risk-factors that I would consider when co-locating a commercial server in a foreign country.
Anyway, this seems like a great idea -- and I'd love to know that my server was powered by low-carbon green electricity, with clever semi-natural cooling. Especially since the cost and complexity of power and cooling infrastructure in a datacenter can easily rival the cost and complexity of the servers themselves.
Please keep us posted!
03/27/2009
There are three active submarine cable systems in Iceland. Tele Greenland and it's Greenland Connect system, eFarice and it's Farice1 system, and Tata Communications CANTAT-3 system. One system, DANICE, is currently under construction and slated for completion in the first quarter of 2009. The operational Farice-1 system has a design capacity of 720 Gb/s. The Danice system has a design capacity of 5.1 Tb/s. The operational Greenland Connect System has a design capacity of 1.9 Tb/s.
The CANTAT-3 system has a capacity of 5 Gb/s and is near the end of its useful life and considered mostly irrelevant in terms of capacity and usefulness.
03/27/2009
There are three active submarine cable systems in Iceland. Tele Greenland and it's Greenland Connect system, eFarice and it's Farice1 system, and Tata Communications CANTAT-3 system. One system, DANICE, is currently under construction and slated for completion in the first quarter of 2009. The operational Farice-1 system has a design capacity of 720 Gb/s. The Danice system has a design capacity of 5.1 Tb/s. The operational Greenland Connect System has a design capacity of 1.9 Tb/s.
The CANTAT-3 system has a capacity of 5 Gb/s and is near the end of its useful life and considered mostly irrelevant in terms of capacity and usefulness.
From RTP, NC, 03/27/2009
This all sounds good but how do you get all the massive data back and forth to Iceland? How much will it cost to install the transoceanic fiber or satellite up/down links?
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