Modularity Wins The Day In Iceland

Thor, the Icelandic data centre which was just described at a London event, could serve as an illustration of pretty much any trend in efficient IT.

It’s designed to host cloud services, which are  tipped to increase the efficiency of IT, and its first tenant is Opera, a browser which has long made claims to be more efficient than its rivals because of its network behaviour.

Renewable energy – the next big thing?

It’s got geothermal energy on tap, so it can be carbon neutral. Of course, you don’t have to go to Iceland to achieve this feat. Next Generation Data in Newport, Wales also gets all its energy from renewable sources, as does Other World Computing in Illinois.

All these data centres will be welcoming last week’s announcement by the Green Grid of CUE, a measurement of carbon emissions caused by a data centre. Alongside the successful PUE efficiency measure, this will give data centre owners a way to compare and promote themselves.

And it’s a very big endorsement of the containerised data centre concept. Thor went from the initial concept to a working data centre in about six months, because the container could be shipped in easily.

And while it used to be said that containers were less efficient than a building designed from the ground up to hold servers, Thor seems to have an argument to say that is not necessarily so.

Modular cooling systems

The container maker AST Modular, has come up with a modular version of the economiser cooling systems that are the current vogue in green data centres, and deliver a PUE of around 1.05.

A separate circulation system allows the outside air to cool the servers, and there is a water system to add evaporative cooling when it is needed … which in Iceland is never, says Thor’s managing director Jon Viggo Gunnarsson.

I’m sure that next week there will be another batch of announcements which could change our opinions, but this week, it looks like modularity is a constructive move, container data centres have got things wrapped up, and Iceland is cool.