Iceland has been advertising itself recently as the perfect place for data storage. According to reports by Business Green, the country may be making major steps towards proving itself in the industry.
Iceland has been identified by many in the information technology field as a possible “data centre capital of the world” for several reasons. The country’s temperate climate reduces the need for cooling, and Iceland is known for providing cheap energy to business and individuals from sustainable resources, relying on geothermal power in most cases.
Many server farms, particularly those in the United States, are under pressure to become more environmentally friendly and cut back on their energy use, making relocation to Iceland an increasingly appealing proposition.
Icelandic data storage specialist Data Islandia and its partner Hitachi Data Systems recently announced a breakthrough in combating some of the hurdles Iceland has faced in becoming the ideal data storage location.
Access speed has been one of the largest challenges faced by Icelandic data storage centres. A new development called Data Scooter is designed to combat this problem. The Data Scooter is a device designed to transfer information between a company’s data centre and a facility in Iceland run by Data Islandia. Work on the facility should be complete by the end of this year.
Data Islandia’s managing director for offshore operations, Sol Squire, explained the situation. “It can take up to three days to transfer a petabyte of data by cable,” he said. “By putting the data on the Data Scooter and flying it [to Iceland] you can complete the data transfer in less than a day.”
According to Squire, the system is both cost effective and time effective when compared against sending data by cable. “The data is encrypted, it travels with a security guard, it doesn’t go through [Heathrow’s] Terminal 5,” he said. “We also only delete the original version of the data once the transfer is fully complete.”