Iceland's Data Center Push Finally Gets Traction 117
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."
WikiLeaks & Iceland's Legislation (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.wikileaks.org/ [wikileaks.org]
Not news here (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What is the bandwith to iceland anyways? (Score:4, Interesting)
Iceland may offer more than power and cooling (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the Wikileaks 1.0 presentation [youtube.com] Iceland could pass a bill which will provide a last resort for information which is suppressed in other European countries (currently on the Wikileaks [wikileaks.org] website with a call for donations).
Re:What is the bandwith to iceland anyways? (Score:4, Interesting)
From what I understand, it's really pretty good. A lot of the transatlantic bandwidth goes up and over, rather than straight across underwater. It helps to have repeaters occasionally, and it's nice if you can service them with a quick drive, rather than a submarine dive. :) It's suppose to make for a very nice place to have service, with fast pipes pointing towards the Northeast US and Western Europe.
In an ideal world, if you had to locate for customers in both the US and Europe, it would be a great place. I know routing doesn't always cooperate as well as you'd like though.
Way back when, I had servers in New York, and in Germany (among other places). Many European customers complained about the speeds to the German datacenter. Some of those were even in the same city in Germany as our equipment. The ones that sent me traceroutes showed that they were being routed from Germany to New York, and then back to Germany. Needless to say, the latency on that was a nightmare. In the end, we moved all of our European traffic to New York, and we started getting thank you notes from all over Europe. We didn't announce what we did, but they could tell the difference in speed. Most of the customers assumed that we simply changed the operation in Europe. They were completely unaware that they were being served out of New York. Well, except the few who knew enough to run a traceroute. :)
So, the Iceland datacenters may be a wonderful thing, or they may be a project that dies in it's infancy.
I know a lot of folks like having their servers within reach. That is, somewhere they can drive to from their home or office in a reasonable amount of time. I've seen with customers all over. Just because they live in god forsaken (and bandwidth limited) nowhere, they'll still host locally.
Eastern Canada then? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is the bandwith to iceland anyways? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/
How come we (South A.) are tied with N America in relative performance? Less user base ergo better service?
Funny for those who think that we use "TCP over poisoned darts" : )
EVE online, CCP (Score:2, Interesting)
Now I am wondering if CCP is getting their servers back to Iceland instead of the UK
Re:What is the bandwith to iceland anyways? (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually feel real bad for them. Have you ever monitored large amounts of traffic? The majority is so boring, you wouldn't even want to see it. :) Oh look, someone just updated their MySpace profile. "Lolz, I my kitty jest jumped off me bed! Dat wuz da bomb." [warning: keyword "bomb"] {sigh}