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.)"

Islands in the Net; shades of Gibson

[postbigbang (761081)]

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'

Re:Islands in the Net; shades of Gibson

[Brian Gordon (987471)]

On the other hand, it's very close to the largest IXP in the world- Amsterdam. Chicago is only good for America.

Re:

[nicklott (533496)]

Go check a map. Iceland is close to Amsterdam in the same way Anchorage is close to New York.

Re:

[IvyKing (732111)]

5) don't want my server called 'homerdottir'

If that's Homer as in Homer Simpson, the server name would be margedottir. In Iceland, the daughters are named after their mothers.

Iceland is probably cool enough that a well designed data center could forgo air-conditioning, unlike the eastern Oregon or eastern Washington sites popular for data centers.

Re:Islands in the Net; shades of Gibson

[by Anonymous Coward]

If that's Homer as in Homer Simpson, the server name would be margedottir. In Iceland, the daughters are named after their mothers.

No, they aren't, at least not as a general rule. The general rule is that all children are "named" after their father (and I'm putting that in quotes since it's not really a name as much as a *description* of who you are); it's possible to use the mother's name instead of the father's, too, but it's neither restricted to nor standard for either sex.

(Also, to pick some nits, you've misspelt "dóttir" (and don't tell me about English dropping accents - it's a different letter, not an accent), and the father's/mother's name is put into the genitive case. For example, the son/daughter of Anna could be Önnudóttir, not Annadóttir or Annadottir - that is, assuming their patronymic name wouldn't be, well, patronymic (deriving from their father's name), of course.)

Hope that clears it up! :)

Make use of the waste heat

[willy_me (212994)]

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

Re:Make use of the waste heat

[TFer_Atvar (857303)]

Unfortunately, here in Alaska, we're undergoing an energy crisis. Here in Fairbanks, where I live, most electricity is supplied by coal and fuel oil. Due to the massive spike in oil prices, energy costs have risen greatly. In southern Alaska, most electricity is being supplied by natural gas, but even that's getting more expensive as the southcentral gas fields begin to run low. Though the short term is somewhat difficult, there is hope from a projected series of natural gas pipelines from the North Slope and the potential for dozens of hydroelectric and/or nuclear plants. Until then, however, electricity prices put the kibosh on most big server farms up here. The bandwidth capacity isn't bad -- we've actually got better connectivity than Iceland, based on the information I have, and a new undersea cable is scheduled to begin being laid between southern Alaska and Washington state next month. As an aside, there's a nice piece on the effects of the 700Mhz auction in Alaska scheduled to be released on Monday in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. I should know; I wrote it.

Re:

[call-me-kenneth (1249496)]

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.

Can you guess the fatal flaw in your scheme? Hint, how big a pipe do you need to serve the population of Alaska?

Re:

[ricree (969643)]

You run the same problem anywhere that is cold and remote, which is what is being discussed right now. Besides, if the other advantages are great enough in a location and there is enough capacity to satisfy at least one or two big companies, the rest of the capacity will follow.

As for Alaska, it has some advantages, but if the energy problem is as bad as TFer_Atvar says, that would be hugely prohibitive. Iceland not only has a cold climate, but has abundant geothermal energy. Unfortunately, it seems a lit

Re:

[willy_me (212994)]

While I believe your campus is as you described, I do not believe your conclusion is valid. It appears to be a case where the campus was not initially designed to support a high performance computing lab. It is quite typical for these things to be added on after the fact. Even if the building is new, the heating, cooling, water, electrical will likely come from a central source that was designed without thought of the lab. And even if the lab was planned, adding other buildings can still cause the syste

CCP

[tolomea (1026104)]

CCP makers of EVE online are pretty much Icelands biggest tech business and their servers are in London.

Bullshit

[afidel (530433)]

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.

Cool air outside doesn't help that much

[Burdell (228580)]

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).

Re:Cool air outside doesn't help that much

[aaarrrgggh (9205)]

While I am no HVAC engineer, I pretend to be one on odd-numbered days.

Cold climates have several real challenges for data centers. From an HVAC standpoint, there are two general ways to cool a data center in a cold climate-- outside air only and air/water cooling. Air/water systems have drycoolers with glycol kept around 30-40F, and circulate the cold water throughout the building to fan coil units. Minimal outside air is brought in for "fresh air," and must be humidified which generally requires a lot of energy.

The air-only systems bring in 100% outside air, but must first temper (heat-- to avoid condensation) it and increase the humidity to control static inside the space. Very little pump energy, but the humidification and pre-heat are expensive.

While it seems trivial to filter out dust, the better air filtration systems increase the pressure drop of the air handling unit, and force you to use a bigger fan. Heat wheels and enthalpy wheels are also an option, but have similar challenges in most real-world situations.

The biggest challenge with cold climates is making sure the diesel generators start when needed. This alone makes most data center managers skeptical at the prospects of cold-climate data centers.

For a truly efficient solution, the best approach is likely to be heat removal at the chip level and recovery for other purposes. 100F air isn't very useful, but if you can get 150F water off the chip then that heat can often be reclaimed for some other purpose more effectively. If all else fails, 150F water is pretty easy to cool off in a closed circuit dry cooler no matter what the outside temperature.

There is also a lot of work going into direct-evaporative cooling solutions (swamp coolers) for data centers, as well as some other non-compressor based cooling systems. Unfortunately, most of these can work very efficiently for 9-10 months a year, and need a separate system to cool for the remainder of the year. Having two systems makes the payback equation often favor the less efficient solution...

Power and Cooling Aren't the Real Reasons

[Comatose51 (687974)]

Sure, they say it's for the cheap power and cooling but we all know the IT administrators are relocating the datacenter to Iceland for two reasons:

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 [youtube.com] (fast forward to the third minute)

Manitoba: Hot New Data Center Market

[miller60 (554835)]

Iceland's not alone. Manitoba, Canada is shaping up as another region that is an getting attention from data center builders [datacenterknowledge.com] due to its climate and energy profile. Large power customers in Winnipeg paid an average of 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour [hydro.mb.ca] 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.

Re:

[TFer_Atvar (857303)]

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.

Re:Bigger cable map?

[TFer_Atvar (857303)]

Though there is a slightly bigger version here [telegeography.com], ostensibly for desktop background usage.

Re:Bigger cable map?

[Naughty Bob (1004174)]

What you really need is a map showing bandwidth. There was one in a recent (paper) edition of The Guardian. The online version [guardian.co.uk] (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.

Re:Bigger cable map?

[Chris Pimlott (16212)]

There's a more useful map in the article itself [invest.is], and the text gives the capacities of the lines:

Farice is running at 20 Gb/sec capacity with an ultimate transmission capacity of 720 Gigabit/second and CANTAT 3, which has 5 Gb/sec capacity both ways with an extra 2.5 Gb/sec to spare.

Re:

[BlueParrot (965239)]

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.

Re:Won't work

[by Anonymous Coward]

Please keep in mind there is such a thing as heat pollution. Warming the water 10 degrees can radically affect the nearby ecosystem.

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.

Re:What of Greenland?

[zmollusc (763634)]

... so does 'Eng' mean 'free of meddlesome bureaucracy'?

 

Re:

[kiehlster (844523)]

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.

Re:

[wellingj (1030460)]

Cue Techno Viking [youtube.com] to bring the lava...