Uncover the mysteries behind Iceland's biggest data center

A few weeks ago, I saw this article on the news website of the Swedish Swedish wire. This article describes how several northern towns in Sweden are promoting and publicizing themselves as the ideal venue for building data centres. The article points out that an unnamed "US internet company (widely regarded as Facebook) intends to build a large data center near the center of Luleå Town in Sweden." "Almost at this time, Google has announced the start of building its data center in Hamina, Finland." Also around this time, I received a call from a representative of Verne Global, the company's new data center in Iceland, ready to be put into use. So the cold northern regions seem to be a hot spot to build data centers these days.

The Verne Global, built in Keflavík, Iceland, covers an area of 18 hectares (about 44.5 acres) and is entirely carbon-neutral (carbon neutral), with commercial electricity coming from the Icelandic Renewable energy grid (which uses geothermal electricity and electricity from hydro-power sources). The park also took full advantage of Iceland's ambient temperature to provide a natural cooling effect. The center is the venue for Verne Global to provide new hosting services, announcing its new hosting service last week. In addition to announcing the news, the DataPipe company, which provides managed services and infrastructure for mission-critical IT and cloud computing, intends to build its data center facility in Iceland through Verne Global, providing a carbon-neutral, managed IT solution, including green-energy-efficient cloud computing and disaster recovery.

I had the privilege of interviewing two executives: Lisa Rhodes, vice president for marketing and sales at Verne Global and DataPipe, Vice president for Europe and the Middle East sales, and Sean McAvan, below are some excerpts from this interview.

Is Verne Global's first large data center in Iceland, the data center that it has just opened?

Lisa: Yes, Verne Global's data Center Park is not only Iceland's first large data center park, but it is actually the first homogeneous data Center park in the industry. Verne Global is uniquely equipped to take full advantage of the modern power grid in Iceland, providing customers with renewable, affordable energy from two sources (using geothermal electricity and hydro-generated electricity) to meet customer data center needs. For example, compared to the traditional data centers in Europe and New York, we can provide customers with more than 50% of the benefits of cost savings.

How important is renewable sources of energy to data centers? Will this change the future pattern of the data center market?

Lisa: Right now, several trends are converging in the data center industry, making affordable renewables a key element in any data center operation. Users have increased demand for high-capacity, flexible, scalable data center parks, and are increasingly concerned about the increasing cost and environmental impact of traditional data centers. The data center industry has always relied heavily on power to run servers and cool the environment, and will continue to do so in the future. In addition, many data centres face changes in regulatory environments that have prompted many companies to actively investigate whether renewable sources of energy meet their computing requirements. All these factors combine to make the need for renewable energy a central focus of data center planning.

How do you normally monitor the energy use and carbon footprint of your data center facility?

Lisa: This is actually a very interesting question because we consider the energy efficiency of monitoring data center facilities from different perspectives. In our Iceland Park, all of our electricity comes from a total renewable energy source: the use of geothermal electricity and the use of hydro-electric power, which means they are carbon neutral, and energy generation does not emit any carbon dioxide. There is also this: we are able to provide "natural cooling" effects, thanks to the weather patterns of Iceland's natural environment, so that the cost of energy is reasonable for our customers, and the traditional criteria for measuring energy use and efficiency do not necessarily apply. That said, it is ultimately up to each client to determine how to monitor the energy usage within its own data center site in a more traditional way.

Do you normally share any data about energy use with your customers?

Lisa: Yes, depending on the energy usage, we're not sharing the same data as each customer, but we can monitor the data at the rack level.

How to strengthen and protect data center facilities to prevent earthquakes and other disasters?

Lisa: Given that Iceland has a rich and affordable renewable energy source through its natural hydroelectric and geothermal power sources, coupled with the use of geothermal electricity, which is the product of earthquakes and volcanic activity, we took this into account when we first selected the data center. The construction of data center facilities takes into account the problems of earthquakes and volcanic activity; part of the data center design and operation includes minimizing any impact on the environment to protect the data Center Park.

In addition to renewable sources of energy, what other features do you want to highlight?

Lisa: We're excited about the launch of a new hosting service and the DataPipe becoming the first customer of the service. With this new service, we will be able to meet virtually any need for power in the data center, from rack to megawatt-level electricity needs. With this approach, we can enable customers to quickly meet the changing needs of their business-a benefit that is more significant than a traditional static datacenter scenario.

Sean, from a datapipe point of view, to work with Verne Global, and use its data center facilities to provide your company's cloud computing and disaster recovery services, what is the attractive place?

Sean: It was a deliberate decision, and it took us a long time to assess the viability of the site for our clients. DataPipe is committed to pursuing a long-term sustainable development strategy, and we look forward to taking full advantage of the carbon, energy and cooling efficiency of the site. This not only meets the industry's growing demand for sustainable solutions, but also benefits our customers, because it provides the energy costs that are easily predictable in the long run--and we are increasingly discovering that this is an important part of delivering IT services in a variety of common computing patterns. Geographically, DataPipe currently serves some of the world's most important financial and technological markets. Iceland is between London and New York-two very important and rapidly growing business units for DataPipe. Low-latency Data center installations provide the best disaster recovery, business continuity, and cloud computing solutions. Finally, the modular design of the data center site provides us with the flexibility to rapidly expand our facilities there as business requirements increase.

Are there any concerns before finalizing the deal? If so, how are they resolved? For example, I'm thinking about this: Iceland is an earthquake-prone country. What is your company's protection from Verne global in terms of physical security and disaster recovery readiness for data center facilities?

Sean: Obviously, security and business continuity are always our priorities when considering locating data centers. We have carefully evaluated the site, as in any other data center where there are known risks, such as Silicon Valley. The data center was formerly the headquarters of NATO, and NATO chose it very carefully, outside the tectonic fault zone and away from any volcano. The site was actually built on bedrock granite, and Verne had to blow up granite to raise the foundation. Finally, Verne set up a number of data centers (including our data center in California State San Jose), and they have done the necessary investigative work beforehand, and we are very relieved.

How important do you think green energy-saving is now and even in the future for cloud services and data center customers?

Sean: Gartner, a renowned research firm, estimates that carbon emissions from all data centers account for about 0.5% of global carbon emissions. As demand for cloud computing solutions continues to grow, the amount of energy needed to provide power to data centers is growing. Organizations such as Greenpeace are already active in mobilizing consumers and investors to use renewable sources of energy to power the data centres of the world's best-known internet companies. In the UK, we have also seen legislation for large consumers, including data-centric industries. We have ensured that our data center facility in the United States derives 100% of its electricity from renewables; Our cloud computing solutions are designed to make the most of our computer resources as efficiently as possible. In Iceland, we found ways to help organizations reduce their carbon footprint and reduce costs. The country's renewable-energy utilities offer the ability to maintain the same power costs for 20 years. In turn, the full use of natural cooling can significantly reduce the total power consumption and utilities costs of the data center site. If you combine those factors with the efficient utilization of resources in our own solutions, we think this is very appealing.

What types of information or data can you access through monitoring tools, and then share it with your customers, indicating that the service is "green and energy efficient"? What level of data do you share?

Sean: Generally speaking, we can provide customers with two types of data: The first is about the power consumption of customer equipment, provided that the customer's dedicated or managed infrastructure is in our place, we can provide real-time data and historical data. The second is the extremely fine-grained data on infrastructure performance that has been refined to the component level to understand the utilization of a single processor or a single memory bar. We can provide all this data to our customers through a secure portal, but we are also sparing no effort to organize those data and organize them into meaningful information for our customers ' business. We produced automated reports to measure application performance and infrastructure impact. Our feeling is that after customers outsource infrastructure or applications, they often worry about security and loss of control. Providing transparent and detailed data, coupled with the development and continuous measurement of service metrics, is a major way to gain trust and let customers see the value of a solution.

Which of the most important aspects of your service would you like to introduce to a potential customer?

Sean: That's the custom solution we designed to meet the customer's business requirements. We do not consider which technology or data center site is a panacea or solution. But we've developed a sophisticated, complete service that is made up of carefully selected vendors, venues, and technologies--we combine these parts into powerful hybrid solutions that we think can support almost any application environment, or almost any business requirement.