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Iceland's Data Center Push Finally Gets Traction
miller60 writes "Iceland is poised for the completion of its first major international data center project, after years of marketing itself as a potential data center mecca. Iceland offers an ample supply of geothermal energy and an ideal environment for fresh air cooling, but its ambitions were slowed by the global financial collapse. But now the huge UK charity Wellcome Trust has provided funding to complete a new data center in a former NATO facility in Keflavik."
How soon until Laki blows again?
I see geothermal power as a bit of a trade off, especially for IT needs; you get a nice sustainable power source, but you're probably in an area where the activity could just as soon destroy your data as well as power it. Then again, if you hosted your Data Center in Iceland, you could probably afford to have backups in another country far, far away from any 'event'.
I hope that this datacenters can take earthquakes, as they are building them on top of active seismic zone on the Reykjanes. But then there is also the volcano problem and the ash that can happen when a volcano eruption is taking place.
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't Iceland a geologically unstable land with an high rate of volcanoes because traversed by a fault line and thus subject to seismicity?
Right, someone could object that also some other place as well filled with important datacenters and nodes has far more seismicity or happens to be under water level in times of sea level rise, but still.
Although geografic spreading like in Akamai make a non-problem of this, at least for big data providers who can afford them: how do we confront the problem of nodes like AMS-IX and other Internet Exchange Points of NAPs potentially vulnerable, and not only to the force of nature?
Would the Net Transit survive a Big One, and then be useful as emergency service too and for communications, the reason it was initially made for, or would it miserably fail by the falling of one of its major nodes? So then does it really make sense to concentrate too many resources in the same place other than from an economic point of view?