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Iceland looks to serve the world.

news.bbc.co.uk

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Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#31

Post by fauigerzigerk »

conflux0 wrote: post #16
hmmmm wrote: post #10

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 reas…

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

That's certainly a plus because you have a court to go to, but tax law is national law in the EU.

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#32

Post by fauigerzigerk »

hmmmm wrote: post #17
conflux0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Considering he was gay and is now dead I would say the answer is yes :-)

But I know what you mean and you are right, the EU doesn't prevent rabid populism. Interestingly though, it's the mainstream parties in the EU who aggressively pursue all kinds of privacy intrusions and surveillance madness.

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#33

Post by 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.

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#35

Post by eru »

kurtosis wrote: post #23

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.

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

Re: Iceland looks to serve the world.

#36

Post by tlb »

stcredzero wrote: post #11
tlb wrote: post #8

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.

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.

I just talked to a guy who's building a data center with 13 MW power input. I assume that includes air conditioning, so if a typical machine + overhead is 130 watts that's 100,000 machines. It might take a while before they fill that even half way.
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