Cleaner clouds from Iceland
Datacenters are energy-intensive facilities that account for a considerable amount of the global CO2 emissions. Why should you care? Because the datacenters are what keep the internet alive. And because the internet is here to stay we should find a cleaner way of powering it.
Finally an Icelandic cloud worth welcoming. The startup Greenqloud promises to be the world's first green compute cloud (Photo: Cortomaltese / CC)
Computers need energy to run, and to run efficiently they need to be cooled, which in turn also requires energy. Datacenters are very energy-intensive facilities, which explain the IT-industry's growing interest in energy efficiency. Google's datacenters are among the most energy efficient in the world, and Facebook's new datacenter in Oregon have applied several energy-efficiency technologies. But even though new datacenters are efficient, they are mostly powered by 'dirty energy'.
- There are many energy efficient datacenters emerging today, and the development is going in the right direction in terms of hardware. But most datacenters are still powered by non-renewable energy sources, explains Eirikur Sveinn Hrafnsson CEO and co-founder of Icelandic company Greenqloud.
According to Hrafnsson the largest datacenters in the U.S mainly run on coal and nuclear power. Less than 15 percent of the energy on average used by these centers comes from renewables. Consequently every tweet or Facebook update you make, or email you send causes emissions.
Dirty bits and bytes
According to Google.com, one Google search account for 0,2 grams of CO2-emissions, while 10 000 searches equals an 8 km trip in an average American automobile. According to the Nielsen Company, in March 2010 6,38 billion searches were performed with Google in the United States alone. This amounts to 1 276 tons of CO2, or roughly a five million km long car ride. And this is just one company, in one month for one country. According to IT research and advisory firm Gartner Inc, the global information and communications industry accounts for approximately 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, a figure equivalent to aviation.
The location of Google's data center in Goose Creek, South Carolina, was chosen because of access to cheap energy and cheap water. However energy efficient, the facility's main energy source is from coal. This is from the opening in 2008 (Photo: Charlestons The DigiTel / Creative Commons)
Change
For the IT industry to be sustainable this needs to change. In 2007 the research vice president at Gartner Inc predicted that during the next five years, increasing financial and environmental pressures will force IT organizations to become greener. Hrafnsson from Greenqloud believes we are approaching this tipping point.
- There is an awakening in this field. People have started to understand that watching YouTube and sending e-mails actually causes emissions. Earlier this year Greenpeace started a group on Facebook to pressure the company Facebook to use renewable energy for their new datacenter. Within just a few weeks 400 000 people had signed up.
Double click on Iceland
So how can you avoid that your excel files or holiday photos contribute to global warming? Greenqloud's suggestion is to move your data to Iceland. Later in 2010 Greenqloud will be opening the world's first truly green public compute cloud. And according to them, storing your data in Iceland makes sense from both an economic and an environmental perspective.
- It is both cheaper and more energy efficient. Because of the naturally cold climate on Iceland we need less energy to cool the datacenters. Also, Iceland is abundant with cheap, renewable energy resources such as hydro and geothermal. This makes our cloud truly green, says Hrafnsson.
- We are marketing towards companies who wish to reduce their carbon footprint. In many countries companies have to pay a carbon tax on their emissions. These companies can reduce their costs both because we can host their data cheaper, and because they are relieved from their carbon tax.
In the middle of it. With submarine fibre-optic systems your data travels just as fast to New York as to London (Image: Invest.is)
Well connected
Iceland is connected to North America and Europe through high capacity, multi-terabit-per-second cables. According to the datacentre developer Verne Global, Iceland is 20 milliseconds from London and 41 milliseconds from New York. The new Danice connection with Denmark was constructed with the needs of datacenters in mind, and stand up to the strictest datacenter demands on capacity and other technical aspects. Iceland's situation directly in between the two continents is a clear advantage says Hrafnsson.
- If you are doing business in both US and Europe, you only need a server on Iceland. Because we are in the middle, data travels just as fast in both directions. Usually global companies need one host for their data in US and one in Ireland. If they choose to host their data on Iceland, they only need one. This is both cheaper and more efficient.
And according to Hrafnsson you need not worry about volcanoes either. The datacenters on Iceland are placed on the western coast, far away from any volcanoes.
Further reading
Cloud computing
Information retrieved on the internet need to exist somewhere on someone's computer. When you do a Google search, you are not really searching the internet, you are searching Google's vast database of websites gathered from the internet stored on their computers. If you upload photos on services such as Flickr or Facebook, or if you use webmail systems like Gmail or Hotmail you are practicing what is called cloud computing. Cloud computing is using someone elses computing power to store data or run programs. Everything that you do in the cloud needs to be stored in a physical location. Usually in huge storage rooms populated by computers, called datacenters.
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