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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."
You're all niggers and kikes.
What is the bandwith to iceland anyways?
A call center that I worked at before I became a developer (Convergys) just closed in my old hometown. My warning to Iceland is to be cautious: there is no loyalty in the call center industry. Sure this is good now and will help the economy but a lot of good it will do in the long run if they close down in four years.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Wikileaks has a proposal to get a bunch of different free-speech, safe-harbor, journalist-protection style legislation through Iceland so as to both spur this kind of development, as well as provide a political safe-haven for data. Apparently it has caught on pretty well locally, and with a small population it's not particularly difficult to get such legislation passed on short notice.
http://www.wikileaks.org/
I honestly couldn't care more or less what they do in Iceland, unless it affects me directly.
However, the title of the article alone has made me smile. It kind of reminds me of myself, throwing out a play on words to get a chuckle. A pun trying to be funny.
Or should I say... punny.
Good timing with the debt issue climaxing.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
It's oh so still
You're all alone
And so peaceful until...
Your site gets Slashdotted
It wasn't that long ago that Iceland's only internet access line went via a Scottish high-street that was getting dug up repeatedly, with the inevitable consequences:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/28/iceland_without_broadband/
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'.
This has been on the cards for about two years now. Construction at the site stopped last month because politicians wouldn't dare go on with the project because of public opposition. One of the top stakeholders in Verne Global is one Bjorgolfur Thor Bjorgolfsson, former owner of failed bank Landsbanki, whose high-interest Icesave savings accounts failed spectacularly and have kicked off the biggest firestorm in the republics' short history. Also, the bandwidth is not a problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Connect (goes to US/CANADA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DANICE (goes to EU) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FARICE-1 (goes to EU) These are the fiber cables we have. As you can read, we have lots of unlit fiber there.
It was called a data haven and it was in a different country, but Iceland seems to be as good a place as any to build one.
I prefer my data-center to be further away from active volcanoes.
Especially since Iceland is essentially bankrupt. Projects like this will help get its economy on the way to recovery, and hopefully accomplish great things for the infrastructure of the internet as well. Particularly if the safe-harbor legislation gets... through...
Woah. I just realized:
Does this mean we can refer to Iceland as Kinakuta now?
the wikileaks guys really want this, too.
the following video is a recording of a very interesting talk by Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt (wikileaks) at the chaos communication congress (here be dragons) in berlin between the years.
http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4/26c3-3567-en-wikileaks_release_10.mp4
http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4/26c3-3567-en-wikileaks_release_10.mp4.torrent
...of a floating ice floe. The latency might be large, but it will definitely outperform a Volkswagen.
Do you have a need for datacenters? We do and I frankly could care less if our datacenters are located in the US and Iceland is an attractive location for the reason mentioned in the article.
You might not care where your data is hosted, but some people do care about the legislation around it and the dangers associated with that.
Kinakuta!
According to the Wikileaks 1.0 presentation Iceland could pass a bill which will provide a last resort for information which is suppressed in other European countries (currently on the Wikileaks website with a call for donations).
...they would put the data center in GREENland.
Harharharharhar. Sigh.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The Wellcome Trust are a huge biomedical research charity. I would imagine that they are looking for processing power(think folding@home type projects) rather than the ability to serve up millions of webpages. If so bandwidth will be less of a concern than cheap reliable power and cooling. Iceland is looking to join the European Union so their Data Protection legislation is probably similar to rest of the EU's.
This has been on the cards for about two years now.
"In the cards" refers to something that is fated to happen, as in Tarot cards. "On the table" refers to a proposal.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It seems like the regions of the world where electricity-hungry aluminum production has centered would do well with data centers. Quebec is also endowed with plentiful hydroelectric electricity, ample cooling capacity, local expertise, and most importantly, proximity to large markets. I almost wonder why i don't hear more about data center hosting in Quebec, given the natural advantages
now we have a real excuse to spend 6-months indoors. By 2020 all good hackers will live in Iceland :)
A friend of mine worked on an earlier attempt to locate a data center in Iceland. They mapped out a place somewhere on the west side that they believed to be seismically stable.
Volcanoes are scary though. You can build miles away from them and still get your HVAC clogged if the wind blows ash your way.
Dear Iceland, "your government" has allowed institutions in your nation (and elsewhere) to claim that "debt is output" and that speculation constitutes GDP. That's a willful, knowing lie.
Nobody should trust the stability of Iceland at all let alone the ability to keep data safe and keep it available through emergencies, "your government" is already milking you for this.
"Yeah, I think it's frozen"
I suspect that Iceland will provide a first rate service. Their climate makes indoor activities and studies much more of a good idea than Miami Beach. It is somewhat like Harvard being in Boston. So much of the year is too cold to do much anything other than study.
We finally have someplace to host all those Björk MP3s.
Have gnu, will travel.
It keeps the hot side hot and the cold side cold.
sigh... I'm old.
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.
Now I am wondering if CCP is getting their servers back to Iceland instead of the UK
Banks that were guaranteed by the Icelandic government, which then tried to weasel out of its obligations.
I didn't hear any of you complaining when the money was all rolling in.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?