

Iceland looks to serve the world. - brg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8297237.stm

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jsm386
Do you really want to build your data center on top of 130 volcanoes?

 _The island has about 130 volcanic mountains, of which 18 have erupted since
the settlement of Iceland. Over the past 500 years, Iceland's volcanoes have
erupted a third of the total global lava output._ \-
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanism_of_Iceland>

~~~
m_eiman
I can't recall ever hearing about a volcano on Iceland threatening people,
though.

The earthquakes are probably a bigger problem, since they affect a larger area
don't all occur in specific locations. Design the building properly and even
that shouldn't be a big problem.

~~~
yosh
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldfell>

5,300 had to be evacuated from the island of Heimaey due to an eruption in
1973.

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hmmmm
A couple of problems: Iceland is small so although it has an image as a cool
sensible safe Scandinavian country it wouldn't take many voters to put in a
far right/far left president who might screw up your business model.

Do you know the details of Icelandic law? Does your corporate lawyers? Your
regulation compliance officers? How many Icelandic Intelectual Property
specialists can you hire tomorrow? There is a reason that banks have HQs in
London/New York - they have a few hundred years of case law that they
understand.

Iceland is bankrupt, which means it is under thumb of the IMF which means it
will do whatever Washington says. Do you want your data to be ruled officially
by Reykjavik but unofficially by MPIA/RIAA/Whoever says.

~~~
conflux0
It shouldn't be too much of an issue considering Iceland is going to
eventually join the EU.

~~~
hmmmm
Austria is in the EU, would you trust Jörg Haider with your gay rights mailing
list?

~~~
sohooo
That would be a highly suspicious situation, considering the fact that J.
Haider died in a car accident more than a year ago.

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louislouis
I like the idea that the internet will be plugged in and powered by the earths
own internal heat. It's like the virtual world and natural world becoming as
one.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
The duality is an illusion. Free your mind.

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tlb
_A company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon
annually_ by putting their data center in Iceland.

A typical server uses 1 ton / year. Not many companies have more than half a
million servers. Perhaps only about 2 companies.

~~~
stcredzero
Just how many data centers have even _close_ to 100,000 machines in them?
There can't be _that many_ of them, but the article makes this sound
commonplace. There are probably quite a few installations with 100's and
1000's of machines. Once you get into 5 digit numbers, you are starting to
reach rarified heights.

~~~
rbranson
The problem is in the explosive growth. The demand for computing power has
grown dramatically over the last few years because of the shift to cloud
computing and the fact that people are expecting "smarter and smarter" and
"more and more" and "faster and faster." If Google had 10x the datacenter
capacity, it could (theoretically) crawl the web 10x faster and return more up
to date results.

~~~
pyre
If you really want to get picky though, more web crawling from Google means
more energy usage on the other end of the line (the crawled server).

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kurtosis
I spent a month in iceland this summer and it is an amazing place. Beautiful
landscapes, long nights in the winter/days in the summer, and it's sparsely
populated. I'm not sure how great of an idea it is to put a bunch of data
centers there, but I would love to figure out a way to colocate _myself_
there. I feel very confident that they will find a way to recover from the
unfortunate events of the past year.

~~~
eru
Just don't go there in winter. The lack of sun can be depressing.

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riobard
I was living in Canada last year and thinking the same idea in the freaking
cold winter. I guess for North America it might be a better idea to put
servers in the cold areas (e.g. Northwest Territories) in the same continent
instead of running optic fibers under the ocean to Iceland and worried about
earthquakes and volcanos ...

~~~
BearOfNH
Not to mention sabotage and blackmail. "Pay me millions or I'll chop your
cables". Hmmm, new meaning for the term "Hacker"...

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motoko
I remember asking engineers at deCODE about building server centers in
Iceland. They said it was too expensive to build and staff a server center and
that there was no surplus bandwidth to depress costs. They said that limiting
constraints for computing in Iceland were personnel, then logistics, then
bandwidth ---not energy and cooling.

"And, in an irony not lost on a country brought to its knees by finance, one
early customer rumoured to have signed a deal to move servers here is - well
who else - one of America's biggest investment banks. "

This "server farm to save the world" story smells like spin for a dish-washing
debt service ---probably because Iceland hates aluminum smelting and fears the
imported masses who'd work there.

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siculars
I think this is a great idea. Iceland needs a new industry and this just makes
sense. Data centers are to the tech age as factories were to the industrial
revolution.

The government can ensure/facilitate high speed fiber links to the continent
and then let the rest take care of itself. As long as there is enough network
capacity this should be a no-brainer.

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chanux
One way we solve and the solution backfires later. But let's go with the
greedy method for now.

