Taken from the comapny's website, an illustration of Verne Global's planned data center campus in Iceland.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The energy-intensive data center industry seems to be an obvious target for countries and regions hoping to reduce their energy footprints.
In fact, legislation such as the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment would require many of the country’s larger data centers to report on their energy use and try to improve their efficiency or face penalties. UK data centers consume between 2.2 and 3.3 percent of the country’s total grid power, according to some estimates. Government figures show that of all the electricity generated in the UK, the share of coal power is 14.2 percent, and nuclear power 18 percent. And while the UK has some renewable energy projects underway, its target is to source 15 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2020.
And as politicians target the data center sector because of its obvious contribution to total energy usage, some argue that such legislation will inhibit a country’s local data center industry, and drive the outsourcing of data center operations elsewhere.
Nokia’s (www.nokia.com) new vice president of service operations, Michael Manos, formerly of wholesale data center provider Digital Realty Trust (www.digitalrealtytrust.com), and of Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), recently said at this year’s Uptime Institute Symposium in New York that carbon regulation will become an issue for all organizations, but especially for those in the data center sector.
While businesses wrestle with legislation on data centers located within their country, there are a number of viable options for companies willing to look abroad. Renewable-energy-rich Iceland offers a lucrative opportunity for organizations’ data center and colocation needs. And with its reasonable proximity to the rest of Europe, many see this island nation in the North Atlantic Ocean as a prime locale for a data center hub.
In an email interview with the WHIR, Lisa Rhodes, marketing and sales vice president of wholesale data center developer Verne Global (www.verneglobal.com), explains why its operations in Keflavik, Iceland offer advantages over local options.
WHIR: It seems that recent proposals in the UK to reduce energy demand could make it even harder and more expensive to build and operate data centers in Great Britain. Can you give me an idea of Iceland’s attitude towards the building of data centers and their power usage?
Lisa Rhodes: Iceland has committed politically to expand their industrial mix and has specifically targeted data centers as a preferred strategy for diversification. The government provides a great deal of support for the industry in the region, offering special tax incentives and has significantly contributed to the development of a world-class, multi-terabit telecommunications infrastructure.
WHIR: Latency is a big concern for many online businesses. What is the difference in latency between, say, a local London data center and one offshore in Iceland?
LR: Online businesses use content delivery networks to address their highest latency concerns because it just isn’t practical for a business to contract web servers all throughout their business regions. Iceland works in combination with any CDN to address these concerns for locations throughout the world. With a latency of less than 20 milliseconds to London, Iceland is actually an easy option for companies to directly serve their area businesses. The only applications that Iceland could not be used for are the high frequency financial trading apps that must reside within meters instead of miles from the trading floors.
WHIR: How do businesses decide if that’s a compromise they’re willing to make?
LR: The current focus on using private, public or hybrid cloud solutions for a variety of hosted, SaaS and other types of applications has demonstrated to CIOs that they can move their services to alternate locations where there is a total cost of ownership benefit. Adding in the TCO benefits that Verne Global and Iceland offer with renewable hydroelectric and geothermal energy resources along with free cooling, this should make an easy decision even easier.
WHIR: EU businesses in many cases are compelled to store their data in the EU. Does Iceland not being an EU member impact its viability in doing business with EU members?
LR: Iceland is a member of the European Economic Area. The EEA is based on the same “four freedoms” as the European Community: the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital among the EEA countries. Thus, the European Free Trade Association countries that are part of the EEA, including Iceland, enjoy free trade with the European Union.
Iceland has a strong data privacy policy that meets the standards laid out by the EU per the European Convention on Human Rights and the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data. In general, there is also no restriction on EU countries moving their data to Iceland. However, there are country-specific data protection rules that might restrict certain applications or types of data from being moved to Iceland. Germany, for example, has very strict consumer data privacy rules that require certain types of data to stay within Germany. This is the exception rather than the norm.
In any case, Iceland’s not being a member of the EU has not been an issue for customers to date. From our perspective, whether Iceland joins the EU or not will have minimal impact on our ability to attract EU customers.
WHIR: What are the advantages of outsourcing to Iceland compared to, say, Germany or the Netherlands?
LR: A core value in the Verne Global model is to achieve the lowest total cost of operations and Iceland’s unique landscape makes this a real possibility with an abundance of inexpensive, 100 percent renewable energy supplied by the region’s hydroelectric and geothermal electricity resources combined with an advanced smart grid technology.
Iceland and thus the Verne Global campus benefit from the northern branch of the Gulf Stream, which helps generate a very temperate climate year-round. Because of this, we’re able to utilize free cooling options and greatly lower electricity consumption as data centers have traditionally required large, power-hungry chillers to cool their servers. For that reason, the capital cost of the Verne Global infrastructure is lower than a comparably equipped data center in Europe and most other regions of the world which would typically require chilling capacity for at least some of the year, if not all of it.
WHIR: Has Verne Global had to tailor its approach to data center design to suit Iceland’s specific characteristics? If so, how?
LR: Iceland offers plenty of opportunities to create a unique data center solution. Specifically, the free cooling options are tremendous. We offer our customers chiller-free cooling solutions on a year round basis. Each suite has a dedicated cooling infrastructure that takes full advantage of the favorable climate, allowing a customer to fully control its cooling and heating infrastructure. The Verne Global operations team works carefully to choose the right settings for power effectiveness based on a customer’s specific server infrastructure.
Thanks to Iceland’s vast quantity of renewable energy resources, our customers can also easily expand their requirements for space and power beyond the original modular suites. The Verne Global campus allows for customized building solutions of up to 45,000 square meters and up to 140 megawatts of total renewable power.
No related posts.
