Michael Kanellos 10 29 08, 11:25 AM

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Iceland Aims at World’s Green Datacenter Hub

Cold air and geothermal power—Iceland hopes these two geographic facts of life will allow it to become a global power in datacenters.

The island nation is cranking up strategies to attract search engines and hosting providers, said Peter Gross, CEO of EYP Mission Critical Facilities, a company that designs datacenters. (Hewlett-Packard bought it and made EYP a subidiary.) Iceland faces some significant hurdles, especially since it’s been so hard hit by the global credit crunch. The broadband connections to Europe will have to be improved. Ireland and Denmark, both of which have growing wind energy footprints, are better connected in terms of fiber.

The air in Iceland can also contain quite a bit of sulfur, which has to be filtered out. Still, the circumstances are attractive. Geothermal power has emerged as one of the country’s most valuable commodities, Gross said. Data remains easier to export than power.

Free cold air is also something all datacenters want. Roughly half of the power consumed by datacenters goes into air conditioners. Some vendors—such as IBM, Dell and HP—have introduced systems that cool computers with chilled water. These can cool computers more efficiently, say supporters, but customers overwhelmingly prefer air cooling, Gross said. Cutting the air conditioning bill in a large datacenter could result in millions in savings. (Chilly air is also one of the reason’s Microsoft is building an ambient cooled datacenter in western Ireland.) Overall, optimizing a datacenter for power consumption can cut an operating budget by $20 to $25 million a year.

The Iceland tidbits came during an aside with Gross at a roundtable with reporters, analysts and HP execs at the HP Labs offices in Palo Alto, Calif. (The labs date back decades and even house the still-untouched offices of the late David Packard and Bill Hewlett. The architecture is great—think Pancake House of Tomorrowland. The photo is of one of the two mosaics at the entrance.)

Other notes during the meeting:

Electricity will continue to be a big headache for large companies. Soon, large companies will spend more on power to run their datacenters than computers and other equipment, said Gross. The total cost of power for datacenters is increasing by about 20 percent a year.

“Datacenters will use more power than a small town with 20,000 to 30,000 households,” he said. “It is becoming the most glaring element of energy consumption in a corporation.”

A large datacenter can cost $200 million to $300 million. That total just includes the building, power systems and air contioners, not computers.

LEED platinum is the standard you want for your datacenter. Going LEED adds about 1 percent to 8 percent to the total cost of construction, but it will pay off over time with lower power bills. Under a new version of the LEED standards coming out soon, it will be easier to get LEED points for installing energy-efficiency equipment. Now, the LEED standards are tilted more toward adopting green building materials.

“The vast majority of projects today are LEED,” he said.

Datacenters a few years ago consumed about 25 watts per square foot. Then in 2004 and 2005 the figure shot up to 52 watts per square foot. Blame it on multi-core chips and virtualization software. These increase computing utility but increase the power density. The average server cabinet at a typical large company will consume 2 to 3 kilowatts. One at a search engine will gobble up 8.5 to 9 kilowatts.

Here’s something wacky to look out for in the future: Most software applications can be pretty much run in a datacenter anywhere in the world. So in the future, large companies could roll them from center to center around the world and take advantage of low nightime electricity rates. Some HP customers and HP itself is already examining ways of shifting computing loads with the clock.