Thor goes green
Thor is the norse god for thunder and lightning. The brand new Thor data center on the other hand delivers data. Lightning fast and environmentally friendly.
Storing your data on Iceland is green, reliable and cost efficient. In may 2010 Thor data center opened the first green data center. More will follow (Photo: Isotckphoto)
Thor Data Center is a company that conceives solutions for storing your data with zero carbon footprint. Some of the best IT people in Iceland have put their heads together to implement a datacenter facility that utilizes green emission-free energy and natural free cooling. This combination gives businesses around the world an option to decrease their carbon footprint while reducing costs of running their data centers.
Safeguard your data and your business
The cost of running private Data Centers that fulfill growing business demand and compliance requirements is constantly increasing. One of the main drivers for higher cost is the increased demand for electricity. At the same time availability is not following demand globally. Now you can safeguard your business from increased electricity cost by moving your data center to Iceland where availability of green electricity is plentiful.
Go green - cut costs
Thor Data Center will keep your data secure, cool and green at low predictable prices. Being able to lock in the electricity price per kilowatt hour for up to 10 years creates unique long term predictability. Thor Data Center is connected to the Icelandic power grid, which has one of the highest uptime in the world. Contracts with Icelandic Power Companies guarantees long term commitment to secure and low electricity pricing. Clean affordable electricity is only part of the solution, the other element is data connectivity. Iceland has high speed, cost effective and high quality resilient connections to both Europe and USA
Norwegian Software Company moves data to Thor
Opera Software ASA, a Norwegian software company, primarily known for its Opera family of web browsers which has several hosting centers globally have signed an agreement to move a significant part of its electronic data traffic to the Thor Data Center via sub-sea cables. With the expected growth of Opera products, any increased traffic will in the future be transferred through the Thor Data Center. Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, founder of Opera Software, will sign the agreement on behalf of Opera. Opera Software currently has over 110 million users for its browsers across the world.
When a user browses the web using Opera Mini browser, the request is sent via the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) to one of the Opera Software company's servers, which retrieves the web page, processes it, compresses it, and sends it back to the user's mobile phone. Now much of this data will be handled by a data center powered by renewable energy. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Iceland lead the way
Earlier this year the Icelandic IT-startup Greenqloud announced that they would open the world's first green compute cloud. As a result, they were voted one of the top 10 most promising cloud computing companies, chosen from hundreds of applicants, by tech-website GigaOM. Another actor Verne Global is developing a 44 acre green data center in a former Nato command center. The independent charitable trust, the British Wellcome Trust acknowledges the importance of green data centers and became the main shareholder of Verne in may 2010.
Further reading
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.
