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Nordic Nations Pitch For US Data Centers
judgecorp writes "Nordic nations are all pitching for business from data centre owners, based on their countries' excellent network provision, plentiful electricity from renewable sources, and a climate where servers can be kept cool cheaply, using the ambient air temperature, with no need for chillers. A Swedish delegation is visiting California to lure other players to follow Facebook into Sweden. Meanwhile, Iceland now has a new multi-tenant data centre to join the existing Thor site, and Denmark has a container-park data centre for its financial industry."
I'd be more worried about server crashes due to hot magma than cooling!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This is a great way to avoid snooping by pesky authorities. Until 5 years from now when Sweden receives the largest request for unfettered access to its systems by all those liberal, invasive governments.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Denmark gets most of our electricity from coal based electricity plants and a small percentage from renewable sources (mainly wind). And we have the most expensive electricity (~41 cents per kWh) in Europe and only topped by Tonga in the World. You would have to be literally insane to place an international data center here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
The financial industry data center is probably placed here because of sensitivity of data or because they have to be placed close to the stock exchange. Or something along that line. It is surely not because we have plentiful cheap and renewable energy.
..just go the whole hog and stick data centres on both poles? Plenty of cool stuff to melt, plenty of sunlight for both halves of the year.
As mentioned, the Swedes have declared all data passing through it free game for its security apparatus. Great for hosting your sensitive data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#Sweden
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Energy is one thing. Ability to actually protect data from warrantless search and monitoring is another.
..don't panic
I'd be more worried about data breaches and server seizures due to their crazy politicians, crazy justice system! and willingness to bend over for all manner of privacy invading measures to satisfy foreign interests. It will be a hot day in Iceland before we move any servers to Sweden. Go Iceland!
Too bad we were forgotten from TFA, in 2009 Google placed their server farm to an old paper mill in Hamina. Now the 5th nuclear power plant (1800MW, what we buy from abroads now) is "soon" completed (before 2015 I hope) and two more are coming.
We have cheap co2 free electricity and cold weather. I believe Finland is going to get a lot of data centers because in addition of chilly weather and good infrastructure here companies can buy a portion of nuclear power producer and get tax free electricity from their "own" nuclear power station. Other Nordic countries do not have such arrangements, there you pay the market price of electricity even if you own a power producer.
The best part about this initiative from my perspective is that these data centers rarely wind up in Stockholm (where a lot of the other IT and dev jobs are) but rather in smaller cities up north where power and land are cheap. And while a data center itself might not bring all that many jobs (I believe I read somewhere that the estimate for Facebook's data center in Luleå was something like 30 to 50 permanent jobs) it does mean that infrastructure is put in place which makes the region more attractive to other companies looking to build data centers. It is also likely to create jobs in the surrounding area and long-term it prevents "brain drain" in the form of skilled workers moving to Stockholm, Malmö och Göteborg just to find work.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
So if cooler climes are all that's required, why not put the servers in Alaska?
Three years ago the company I retired from looked at this facility, which at that time was a figment of someone's imagination. What we found, the "cheap" power and "Free Cooling" could not offset the Limited and high cost bandwidth, and the high lease rate even with favorable currency conversion rate. The other factors that cause us not to consider this location were the limited air service for bringing spares parts and extra personnel. We found an educated, but extremely small labor force that could be used to support the facility. In most cases major support would have to be shipped in from the UK or the United States. Seismic issues were also a major issue. Given the terms and conditions of our Service Level Agreement there was too much risk to assume for a facility that when all costs were factored in would not provide a significant savings over other facilities.
Iceland has the population of Cleveland Ohio, and Cleveland Ohio has more commercial aircraft flights per day then Iceland has per week.
Yes I want to move all my data to a country that has proven it is willing to roll over for foreign governments - nay, foreign movie industries... What could possibly go wrong. Of course one the data is all in Sweden I can imagine that suddenly Sweden will be receiving a lot of "terrorism-related enquiries and please hand over all the servers" by the US and other countries.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Nordic countries can't compete internationally because their labor laws are insane. Everyone gets paid a lot of money, they can't be made to work very hard, about 99% of the calendar is a paid holiday, there's a lavish benefit for everything from paternity leave to trash collection day and all labor disputes are decided in favor of who resembles Sesame Street the most.
Much better than Europe.
The USA doesn't have any locations (like Wyoming, Colorado or the Dakotas) with an abundance of cheap energy, high speed data connections and local cheap power.
How about selling political stability and business climate?
My company has been running a part of its cloud service out of Swedish datacenters for the past few years to better support our EU customers and avoid issues with European data on US soil. Service to EU customers has been good, however it has been an absolute pain to manage connectivity between the US and Sweden. Telia provides the primary internet service link to Sweden across the Atlantic and we have been seeing so many dropped packets on the Telia network that there have been days where we have not been able to maintain connectivity to our own machines.
On top, since Sweden is not a part of the EU, we are having to jump through legal hoops to meet EU data privacy law requirements. For data residing in the US, we can leverage the SafeHarbor mechanism to demonstrate EU PII compliance. This does not work, when we host the data in a third party datacenter in Sweden.
End result is, that we are moving our data out of Sweden and into the EU (UK or Holland). This solves all of our PII issues, and it gets us off the overloaded Telia networks. Oddly, we have found that we can get a higher level of service in the UK and Holland at a significantly lower cost...
33.600 m^2 data center planned, the largest in the Nordics:
http://www.vg.no/teknologi/artikkel.php?artid=10043193
18.000 m^2 nuclear detonation resistant mountain complex planned converted into green data center:
http://www.tu.no/it/article234366.ece
120.000 m^2 (the worlds largest) magnesium iron silicate mine planned converted into one of the worlds largest, most secure and environmentally friendly data centers:
http://www.tu.no/it/article232094.ece
I also belive CERN recently said they wanted to move their data center to Norway, but I think our politicians f* up that.
The last five years it has been interesting to see deficits turned into opportunities. In this article, it's the unrelenting cold of Scandinavia being used to cool the heat engines known as servers. In the American Midwest it has been turning the unrelenting winds, which used to be cursed and inveighed against, into wind power that is putting more money in people's pockets than they've seen in 100 years.
I am far from capitalism's fan, but it does occasionally produce results better than its proponents intended.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
no need to cross an ocean to have nordic climate , good data connectivity and cheap renewable green electricity , just go north of vermont / NY state , i pay 6 cent a Kw on a regular joe electricity bill , immagine if i was running a couple hundred thousand servers at half that price (we have alluminium plants that get real good deal from our government owned Hydro-Quebec)
Did you write this comment in the early 1990? Last time I looked out my window there were EU flags hanging next to the swedish ones. Our licence plates has the obligatory EU symbol and my EU driver licence even has a tiny EU symbol on it.
Due diligence you said?
Well, I suspect your network suffered the same problem as your "due diligence".
Norway is the nordic country not being a member of the EU.
I don't.
We decided not to try and get into the business because we can simply say "Fuck it, we have oil".
Of course, the absolute ultimate server park location is Longyearbyen since we have proper power there, we have some of the biggest Internet pipes in the world there (it's where the cross arctic fibers come down), we have passive data center cooling there 9 months of the year. Other than the 75% of the nations graduates who came from BI (in otherwords useless as shit but can still sell oil), the remaining 20% are dominated by top notch IT geeks, just check Finn.no and you'll see there are two type of jobs in abundance right now "useless bastards who wear ties" and "IT this and IKT that".
P.S. - Not all bastards who wear ties are useless, just the ones who spent 3 years in a business school isolated from anyone who knows anything about anything and graduated without taking a single math or science class and then went on to sell oil hehe.
The advantage of Holland is they have a better educated workforce, with multi-lingual abilities. Nice if you want to branch out from there into other EU countries. Plus, the AMS-IX is located in AMSterdam. Good connectivity. They also have much better labor laws if you want to run 24/7 operations.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
The Facebook data center in Luleå will use about 100 megawatts electricity, while the steelworks only uses 80-90. Just using the waste heat from the center is enough to to supply 40.000 houses with heating... though the waste heat from the steelworks is already used for that... so the waste heat from the center will just be eh... wasted...
Alaska has the cold as needed. Build the data centers on the north slope, run the fiber cables along the pipeline to Valdez and you are in business. Or if you like Canada better Yellowknife could be a good place.
Sweden is part of the EU since 1995 (i.e., going on the 17th year now). The privacy laws are stronger in Sweden though, which is probably what you mean, but I cannot fathom they're too hard for you. Compliance is, from what I know, easy as long as you don't store Swedish personal identification numbers (personnummer).
Were they only BREIN-less, moving to the Netherlands would be a no-brainer.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.