I never knew

In 2007 I wrote a quick post about infrastructure opportunities.

I’ve also wondered previously about opportunities with cheap electricity, seems The Google and other huge server farms are spending more on electricity than on hardware, hello Hydro Québec joint venture?

Found this in September 2011:

The facility will run on geothermal and hydroelectric power – in Iceland, all electricity is from renewable energy sources. The project was commissioned by the UK start-up Verne Global, itself a data hosting company, which plans to use Iceland’s cheap power to undercut rival European offerings.
—World’s first zero-carbon data centre to be built in Iceland

And then this just last week:

The enormous server farm facility in Luleå, northern Sweden, to be announced officially on Thursday morning, is the first time that the social networking giant has chosen to locate a server farm outside the US.
“The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers,” said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a ‘Node Pole’, luring in other international computing giants.
“If you take the statistics, the temperature has not been above 30C [86F] for more than 24 hours since 1961. If you take the average temperature, it’s around 2C [35.6F].”
—Facebook to build server farm on edge of Arctic Circle

See, now that would have made for an interesting Plan nord.

[Update on Nov. 7th] Thought so, seems they are on it (FR) but Hydro didn’t find the idea interesting enough 3 years ago. Merci Josée pour le tip.

A few months ago, I wrote about infrastructure opportunities, seems I’m not the only one thinking along those lines:

Locating the server farms in the Canadian north offers several environmental advantages. These include easy access to clean energy sources such as wind and geo-thermal energy and, given the colder climate, decreased energy requirements to cool the computer server farms. In fact, St. Arnaud argues that the heat generated by the computers can be captured and used to heat nearby buildings leading to zero carbon data centres.

In addition to the environmental considerations, locating computer server farms in Canada would offer Canadians better privacy protection since their data would never leave the country and would be subject to national privacy laws.—The Race Toward Clean Cloud Computing

Last week a client (book editor) decided to go with a canadian hosting company because of certain copyright and public domain problems their lawyers were fearing if their content was hosted in the US. This morning I read this post about the Amazon S3 SLA and the author comments:

Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Acts (FIPPA) don’t allow me to store sensitive information (e.g., students’ work) in jurisdictions that permit secret warrants, like those mandated by the USA PATRIOT Act. It wouldn’t even help if Amazon ran a cluster farm in Canada, since the PATRIOT Act applies to subsidiaries of American firms operating in other countries as well.

Different but related issues. I’m sure those same issues apply to a lot of countries. Opportunity for canadian companies to step in with similar services? I can’t think of someone already well positioned to “just add” the service but I’m sure there’s expertise somewhere.

I’ve also wondered previously about opportunities with cheap electricity, seems The Google and other huge server farms are spending more on electricity than on hardware, hello Hydro Québec joint venture?