back to article College sticks cloud into geothermal igloo data centre

It's cold, it's bleak, and it's best known economically for its fisheries industry and the 2008 banking crisis, but Iceland is also the source of a radical solution in managing data centres that has led an English further education college to do a deal that will be available for the education sector throughout the UK. Hertford …

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  1. Peter2 Silver badge

    Brilliant.

    More equipment and thus jobs outsourced, more imports and therefore more money flowing out from the UK.

    Tough on jobs, tough on the causes of jobs.

  2. Bumpy Cat
    Go

    Worthy cause

    This addresses two issues that bother me:

    - the constant fleecing of gov money by large corporations

    - the incompetent/uncaring result of outsourcing function to said large corporations. As a university sysadmin, you can bet I'll work like a dog to fix a problem - it's my system! For some of our partners, they'll do the bare minimum to fix something, and more worryingly our policy ends up being dictated by them.

    Educational systems are better run by people who work at the institution, because we have a much better view of how systems should work, and how they tie in to the rest of the institution.

  3. JimC
    Coffee/keyboard

    brilliant sub-head

    the keyboard industry thanks you:-)

  4. Anonymous Coward 15
    Mushroom

    There's that much connectivity to Iceland?

    And what about volcanos, earthquakes etc?

  5. thondwe

    Could be bad timing...

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15995845

  6. Alfie
    Go

    No geothermal power, but if you want low temparature range to reduce cooling costs, and keep the data in the UK then why not stick your data cente on Shetland? Presumably there is a decent net connection and it keeps the jobs in the UK.

    Get some wave/tidal power just off the coast and your sorted!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Decent connection to Shetland - ahahahahaha you jest.

      There isn't a decent connection to Shetland - or any of the Scottish Islands for that matter - many of the connections are totally saturated at peak times just with consumer traffic.

      Iceland has in excess of 8Tbps (increasing again in 2013) of capacity and PoPs in the USA, UK, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Canada. In short its a HELL of a lot easier to offshore data to Iceland than it is to Scotland and that won't change anytime soon.

      Oh and of course Iceland has dirt-cheap electricity with commercial prices so stable you can get a 20 YEAR contract guaranteeing your costs. Compare that to the fucked up mess Huhne and the clueless fuckwits who went before him have made of the UK's power market.

  7. Tom 38
    WTF?

    10Gbit/s uplink

    Yet they transferred the data by air freighting SANs backwards and forwards?

    When I set up my home file server it took me about a day to transfer 6 TB of data to it, and that was over a shitty £15 SoHo 1Gbit/s switch.

    1. Lance 3

      You could have 100Gbit/s, you CANNOT overcome latency due to distance issues. All the faster speed does is reduce the serialization and queue delay which is already pretty low at 10Gbit/s.

    2. TeeCee Gold badge
      Facepalm

      All well and good, as long as nobody else wanted to use JANET and the Thor links while they were busily piping 30Tb across them.

      That might be an issue....

  8. TimB

    @Tom 38

    The implication is that it's 10Gb/sec, and £x/Gb. Presumably it's cheaper to ship a SAN out there than it is to pay for the bandwidth.

    1. Tom 38

      A typical bandwidth deal is to bill for speeds up to a certain point, and usage above that point is charged at the 90-something percentile. Even if they rate limited it at less than 1Gb/s, it would surely cost less than shipping SANs around the world.

      Plus, if this is to offload your data somewhere cheap, I don't see what sort of cost saving you will get if it then costs a fortune to access it.

  9. scientific_linux_01
    Linux

    Volcano

    I think the volcano would be a big concern.

  10. Irony Deficient

    Grauniad Gonnrevmet Cogumptin

    The name of the city in Iceland is Hafnarfjörður.

  11. No such thing as an Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Did I read the article correctly...

    "We'll be running finance, HR, Moodle (an open source learning application) and others, just about any application that we don't require to be here, things like access control and CCTV. We can manage it remotely; it's on our IP network so we can log in just as if it's sitting next to us."

    Based on the above: when theres a network outage, their CCTV and door system will be unavailable when access to the Janet network, other intermediary network(s) (linking Iceland and Blighty) and the Thor network isn’t available. In a certain part of London, that can be every Tuesday morning for up to an hour or so when planned maintenance on that part of the Janet network takes place .

    On the saving on energy and being green: exactly how will the CCTV and access control servers, being moved to Iceland - save them money. When the cameras (assuming IP cameras), switches, door controllers are all back in Blighty.

    Me thinks they haven't factored in the energy that runs the network equipment which is underpinning the whole thing.

    1. Oninoshiko

      It's poorly worded,

      but they meant to say that access control and CCTV would be local. I reach this conclusion because they start with examples of things that they are moving, then talk about what they are not.

      It really is a bad sentence though... makes you wonder how well they teach, does it not?

  12. Tom 7

    what could go wrong?

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15996754

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