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Iceland Woos Data Centers As Power Costs Soar
call-me-kenneth writes "Business Week covers the soaring demand for power and cooling capacity in data centers. Electricity consumption for US data centers more than doubled between 2000 and 2006. Among the other stats: for every dollar spent on computing equipment in data centers, an additional half dollar is spent each year to power and cool them; and half the electricity used goes for cooling. Iceland, with its cool climate and abundant cheap power, is courting big users like Google and Microsoft as a future data center location. (Can't help thinking they're gonna need a bigger cable first, though.)"
It's intentionally small. They're selling a paper version for over $100, and probably don't want to give folks a reason not to buy.
Though there is a slightly bigger version here, ostensibly for desktop background usage.
Good for Iceland. I hope they get some big fish.
Careful What You Wish For....
What you really need is a map showing bandwidth. There was one in a recent (paper) edition of The Guardian. The online version (it's in the bottom right) is a bit too small to be very useful, but it's big enough to see that yes, Iceland needs a better connection is it is to become the world's data centre.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Big deal, they have plenty of water to cool it with being an Island and everything. Point about putting a data center there is cheap electricity due to abundant renewable energy, such as geysers and hydroelectrics.
Five good reasons:
1) cheap geothermal power
2) cheap geothermal cooling
3) easy freight
4) educated and even DNA-tracked populace
5) computing is an indoor sport
Five considerations:
1) they like to go whaling; not necessarily a friendly thing in by some opinions
2) latency; not as a bad as a sat, but not as good as Chicago for US; geo centric for North America and EU
3) earthquakes and unsettled geography
4) too many thermal pools to screw off in
5) don't want my server called 'homerdottir'
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I would suggest locating data centers in a cool climate where farming is popular. Pump the waste heat from the data centers into greenhouses that can surround the data center. Now that waste is helping to grow food.
Alaska is actually a good place to implement such a solution. There is a huge amount of sunlight in the summer which, assuming you can avoid frosts, can grow amazing produce. All you need are greenhouses and a heat source. In the winter, when sunlight is no longer plentiful and farming shuts down, the heat can be pumped into local housing. Such a solution would also provide local produce in Alaska - produce that is fresh and doesn't require expensive shipping. One last point about Alaska, it's very central. It might not appear to be when looking at a map, but if you look at a globe you will see that it sits nicely between Asia and North America. I don't know where the current internet pipes are located but if they pass close to Alaska then this idea would be worth some consideration.
William
I haven't heard that before, but it would make some sense. The big issue I see is that Iceland really isn't icy. It even has active volcanoes and geothermal hotspots. Not really what you think of when you put in a data center. If the Vikings really did change the name, then they'll have succeeded in fooling corporations generations later by it. Cue Vikings laughing at Google as its data centers melt under hot lava.
CCP makers of EVE online are pretty much Icelands biggest tech business and their servers are in London.
You'd have to have a very cheap and very power inefficient server to come even remotely close to their claims of half of the cost of the server on power. An elbaso HP Dl360G5 costs $1600. It will use about 300W at typical load, but lets call it 250W to make the numbers easier. Double this for inefficient cooling and power conversion in the UPS (this is overly costly but makes up for underestimating power usage) so 500W. There are 8,760 hours in a year so 4,380 KwH, you'd have to pay $.20 per KwH to reach their figure, this is over twice the US national average. Prices where you'd want to put a datacenter are closer to $.06-$.08 per KwH. My average server cost closer to $7,000 with battery backed RAID card, dual fast drives, dual CPU's, 4GB memory, 3 year 6 hour repair contract, etc. Even powering that kind of servers off diesel generators fulltime it would have to draw ridiculous amounts of power to cost half it's purchase price in electricity every year.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm not saying your typical data center is going to put out the same heat as a nuclear reactor. They actually take steps to cool the water, but it's still warmer than it went in. I certainly don't think heat pollution will be a concern. Gigawatt size coal plants and nuclear reactors have to worry about heating nearby rivers, but in this case we are talking about the additional load to run datacenters heating the Atlantic Ocean. A 1 GW electric power plant will typically reject 2 GW thermally (which is a lot of local heat). But 3 GW is a lot of power to be generated in one spot. The renewable energy sources of Iceland certainly don't generate anywhere near that much power per unit area. And the heat rejected from datacenters will be trivial and widely distributed.
I think two things will stop these datacenters from going to Iceland: restrictive immigration laws and submarine data cable capacity. Iceland has a total population of about 300,000. They simply can't have a diverse enough IT industry to support setting up these data centers without expats. And without the bandwidth, there simply isn't a point.
Air heat transfer is not that good, and you can't just pipe in outside air to cool the data center (due to dust and humidity control), so it doesn't generally work out that a cool outside climate lowers cooling costs significantly. If you compared it to some place with high (35C) normal temperatures, it might make enough of a difference (because standard air conditioning efficiency does drop off in that range IIRC), but that is not most of the US. Also, 50% of power going to cooling is not representative; it should be down closer to 35% from what I remember of our numbers (and we're in a location with relatively hot summers). Our electric rates are also already pretty cheap; commercial rates can go as low as 4.721 cents per kilowatt hour (plus a demand charge).
... so does 'Eng' mean 'free of meddlesome bureaucracy'?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Cue Techno Viking to bring the lava...
Money is the root of all evil?
1. Part of the year in nearly total darkness. Nerds and the daystar don't mix well.
2. Real reason anyone goes to Iceland: Icelandic girls (fast forward to the third minute)
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Iceland doesn't have much in the way of natural resources but it has all that power. The way to export that power so far has been to import alumina and export aluminum. The conversion takes a lot of energy. Server farms are another way of exporting power.
The problem is that no-one in their right mind would house their servers here. We have no real redundancy in connectivity. One cable breaks and we suffer increased latency and reduced throughput. This happens more often than most data center clients could tolerate. The good news is that this problem can be solved with more cables. They're not cheap, but neither is building aluminum smelters. Once there are at least two cables going west and two going east, each with sufficient capacity to carry the whole load, then Iceland will be a very nice place for servers.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Because Iceland's geothermal energy extraction doesn't emit CO2. The extracted energy was going to leak to the atmosphere eventually anyway.
Only CO2 emission would increase global warming, which is, as the name says, global, not local. Just pumping thermal energy doesn't do so. Even huge emitters of pure thermal energy, like coastal nuclear power plants, have significant effects only in their immediate vicinity.
Iceland's not alone. Manitoba, Canada is shaping up as another region that is an getting attention from data center builders due to its climate and energy profile. Large power customers in Winnipeg paid an average of 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour in 2007, cheaper than the average rate in virtually every state in the U.S. except Idaho. That's all clean, green power from Manitoba Hydro, which operates 14 hydroelectric generating stations and also buys the output of a 99-megawatt wind farm.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge