We're used to offshoring work to other countries to achieve cost reductions or follow-the-sun working, or both. We're also used to having some of our computing activities and services hosted remotely through web hosts, Salesforce.com, Google, Facebook et al.
Some of these companies run huge data centres and they are concerned about continuity of energy supplies. Some are siting themselves near renewable energy sources, others moving to where they can get the stuff cheap or to locations where they can avoid declaring their energy consumption. (True, but you can do your own research on that one.)
Anyone who's a serious consumer of power is trying to find ways to get the consumption down. Hardware and software suppliers are having a great time selling virtualisation software, efficient new kit and clever new cooling systems. And, when customers have all done this and got themselves sorted out, they'll still find that the need for computing resources will grow and they'll have to find new ways to cope.
Well, with a hat tip to an announcement by Data Íslandia and Hitachi Data Systems, another possibility has surfaced. Why not move all the hosts to safe countries where natural energy abounds? The 'safe' is probably the main challenge. If you think 'solar' then some of the hottest countries also happen to be the least desirable from this perspective.
Iceland, on the other hand, has a rather unusual combination of plenty of renewable geothermal and hydro-electric energy coupled with a cool climate. It has a technically literate population and it is relatively secure. No-one seems to want to invade it, for example.
Data Íslandia specialises in providing disk- and tape-based long-term data archiving services. Yesterday's Hitachi deal is based on its data management services which will enable multinational organisations to address the management, compliance and environmental burden of exploding data volumes. Data Íslandia director, Sol Squires, says "virtualising six-month old information, which is effectively digital toxic waste, is a very poor use of resources." Customers will be able to offload stale data while still having real-time access to it.
No doubt there are a million political reasons why I'm wrong, but Iceland strikes me as an environmentally agreeable and secure place to house our national digitised libraries. Maybe our tax records too.
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