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."

Comments

Iceland???

[maroberts]

I'd be more worried about server crashes due to hot magma than cooling!

Re:Iceland???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, better rely on the safety of California!

Re:Iceland???

[_Shad0w_]

That being the magma they use to generate around 25% of their power requirements via geothermal energy. The majority of the other 75% comes from hydroelectric. Less than 1% of their power comes from fossil fuels. They also use the geothermal energy for heating the vast majority of buildings in Iceland.

The average temperature is also bellow 15C, afaicr, which makes cooling things a doddle.

All things considered, I wouldn't mind living there. If their economy wasn't fucked.

Re:Iceland???

[ComaVN]

If their economy wasn't fucked.

If Iceland's economy is fucked, I'd like to know where I can sign up my country's economy for a proper rogering.

Re:Iceland???

[aaaaaaargh!]

Not only that, they also have to worry about elves. The hidden people are generally friendly but they do not like being disturbed. If the data center is build in one of their areas, they might curse the data. Perhaps they already have...think about Iceland's recent economic breakdown...

Re:Iceland???

[FriendlyLurker]

Icelands economy has recovered nicely. So well in fact that it is making Ireland, Portugal, and Greece jealous.

Quote from last link:

ICELAND pursued better policies than Ireland or Latvia when the three countries' economies collapsed in 2007 because the Reykjavik government allowed banks to fail, according to a new report by the influential Bruegel think tank." ... "The experience with the collapse of the gigantic Icelandic banking system suggests that letting banks fail when they had a faulty business model can be the right choice," the report notes.

Re:Iceland???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Fuck taking on generations of debt to cover the gambling losses of bankers. Anything "too big to fail" should either be allowed to fail or be nationalized anyway. Capitalism doesn't work if investors have the profits without the risk.

Re:Iceland???

[Dave Whiteside]

the only main sticking point is that Iceland only has 3 data cables - Europe, Scotland and Greenland - though I think another is in the pipeline to the US / Canada

Re:Iceland???

[dkleinsc]

It wasn't quite "allowing the banks to fail" in the sense that the Icelandic equivalent of FDIC kicked in and the banks were nationalized, but the key thing was that Iceland spent absolutely no cash on trying to bail out holders of stocks and bonds. It's that combination of socialism and capitalism that is not uncommon in European nations: The socialism is enough to ensure that you'll survive. The capitalism means that if you're invested in a big bank, or a CEO who's made some dumb decisions, you take your losses.

Innovative

[alphatel]

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.

Re:Innovative

[aaaaaaargh!]

I think you confuse military cooperation with the possibility of industrial espionage. The two issues have nothing to do with each other. Just because you trust a network to handle shared military information doesn't mean you can or should trust the same network to handle trade secrets, financial information, or military state secrets.

Re:Innovative

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you trust a network to handle shared military information doesn't mean you can or should trust the same network to handle trade secrets, financial information, or military state secrets.

Shouldn't be a big problem. As far as I know none of the Nordic countries have a history of handing over snooped information to competing companies. The same can't be said for the U.S. (The Wikileaks documents have shown that CIA still practices this behaviour.)

Denmark, you must be kidding

[jlar]

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.

Re:Denmark, you must be kidding

[jlar]

"How can Denmark have electricity twice the price of Finland?"

Because taxes constitute half of the price. Or to put it differently: electricity is taxed by approximately 100% in Denmark. But I just read that commercial entities are exempt from some of the taxes. But even without any direct taxes we pay twice the price consumers do in the US. And that is probably caused by other types of regulation on electricity production. Our politicians have a nasty habbit of implementing hidden taxes that are subsequently paid by the consumer.

Re:Denmark, you must be kidding

[jlar]

"Denmark got 33% of its electricity from renewable sources (and it was a bad wind year, only 80% of a normal year)."

That is only half true. 33% of the electricity _production_ was from renewable sources. Not the consumption. The problem is that wind energy is fluctuating with the wind speed. We are therefore exporting surplus wind energy at very low prices during peak production periods and importing expensive electricity (which can be renewable, e.g. from Swedish nuclear plants) during calm periods. And even worse: every one of these cheap kWh that we export are subsidized by Danish consumers.

But my main point is: We do not effectively get 33% of the electricity of the electricity that we consume from renewable sources (and implicitly ~20% from wind energy). According to a recent study we actually only consume half of the wind energy in Denmark (i.e. 10%).

Yup

[upside]

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

Re:Yup

[TheInternetGuy]

>As mentioned, the Swedes have declared all data passing through it free game for its security apparatus.
Great for hosting your sensitive data.

Yup, but you are fooling your self if you don't think any other government is doing the same. And this data will most likely be shared with US agents if they come knocking, looking for something.

Re:Yup

[icebraining]

My government's IT people are far too incompetent and underfunded to manage to snoop on anything.

How about those privacy laws?

[xtal]

Energy is one thing. Ability to actually protect data from warrantless search and monitoring is another.

Sweden???!!!

[FriendlyLurker]

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!

Re:Sweden???!!!

[Corbets]

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!

You have to be careful trusting the Local for news. We have them in Switzerland too, same company, and all they do is poorly translate then over-sensationalize stories. Can't speak for the other sources, though.

Finland, three new nuke plants coming

[Suomi-Poika]

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.

Re:Finland, three new nuke plants coming

[Skal Tura]

The nature of my job makes me research the situation constantly. Problem is high transit costs in Finland. Cheapest i've found is 1.3€/Mbps as a special deal commitment in a small business budget range, above that HE.net was willing to come to Finland for min. 5Gbps commitment at 10k $ which would be currently 1.52€/Mbps.
Goto central Europe and you can get transit at 0.8€/Mbps, and Peering will actually be a huge net benefit. But here in Finland you got to stick mostly with transit.

Transport prices are also high, so you cannot connect to say AMS-IX on the cheap neither because the transport costs takes you to near transit prices.

Still, most Finnish companies are charging around 5-7€/Mbps of transit. Colocation prices are not cheap neither. Many of the DCs i see has huge chillers and do not depend upon outside weather to be cold at all, infact, seems quite to the contrary.

Peering is next to useless in Finland too because of the FICIX peering monopoly, and the only worthwhile peers won't peer with you unless you are ready to pay in total more than transit, ie. Elisa wants you to hook up on all FICIX locations which will bring the cost of exchanged data way too high, seeing that FICIX peering amount is quite low. Also Elisa is nasty to peer with, and the peering will not work properly.

The choice of Transit providers is also very limited compared to Sweden.

Also, if you are on off-net location the costs skyrocket to around 15€/Mbps with 1Gbps commit, even if doesn't require any new fiber to be laid out.

However, new DCs are being build constantly, there was several new majors ones built last year alone, one of which has military spec physical security (old military bunker or something).

The transit prices are not insane high, but they are definitively not competitive. Same goes for electricity.

As a swede I welcome this

[mikael_j]

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.