Networks Europe Mar-Apr 2016 | Page 14

14 GREENING THE DATA CENTRE SICS Swedish ICT, in partnership with the Luleå University of Technology has started building the first phase of a national large-scale data centre facility for testing and experimentation around big data and cloud technologies. the whole community pulled together to create a compelling opportunity for the internet giant. In 2010, Mayor Karl Petersen and the CEO of the Luleå Business Agency Matz Engman visited Facebook in California to brief them on the attractions of the region. The selection process spanned 18 months encompassing extensive evaluations including other Nordic sites before The Node Pole was determined as having the best combination of attributes and selected. Mayor Petersen, who has written a book - Hello Mr Mayor, this is Facebook calling – chronicling the investment, said at the time: “Facebook’s data center in Luleå marks the beginning of a new era, as we are now entering a digital industrial age. Facebook required a certificate verifying that the energy consumed by the facility would come from renewable resources. Thanks to the Lule River, we could guarantee this. In fact, the Lule River generates nine per cent of all Swedish electricity through hydropower”. Colocation with Hydro66 Motivated by an ambition to offer green, low cost colocation services to all companies, not just the internet giants, Hydro66 carried out a site selection exercise in 2014 with a view to embarking on an initial specialist hardware deployment. From here we produced detailed plans to create a dedicated ultraefficient, green data centre facility. The Norrbotten region of Sweden is a particularly attractive one to energy intensive industries. Until the 1980s the Lule River was notable for the transportation of timber from the forests to the main city of Luleå. Today the big draw is its renewable hydroelectric generation. The scale is impressive with sixteen hydroelectric power stations producing 4,300 MW of electricity. The largest situated at Harsprånget generates 977 MW, the largest hydro station in Sweden, the third largest in the Nordics. To help with context, this power station could supply all the colocation data centres in London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris… Data centres depend on low costs and a reliable, plentiful source of power. Coupling all of this with the cold location produces cost savings avoiding expensive compressor based air conditioning which creates a high capital cost and an increased overhead to the overall power consumption of a server farm by as much as 50 per cent. The construction of a new 120MVA substation fed by four diverse regional grids was a substantial factor in locating in Boden. Using power from diverse generating stations and distributing it throughout the data centre increases reliability; using power close to its generation cuts out transmission losses and wasted power. The Node Pole Facebook is not the only company to acknowledge the regions suitability for high power hosting. Four local municipalities combined into a marketing and business support organisation, The Node Pole, to attract investment. The largest is a specialist digital currency company, KnCMiner. In 2015 KnC announced two expansions of its existing data centres in Boden, Sweden. Increasing from 30MW to 70MW they more than doubled the power consumption of the town representing an expansion close to double that of new colocation service take up in London in a typical year. At the same time there is a focus on academic developments for data centre and cloud research. The Arctic gold rush Ten years ago the cost of connectivity meant that locating data centres in regions with abundant power generation was not always economically viable. As fibre prices continue to fall and power costs increase, it is more cost effective to ship photons rather than electrons. Additionally, the Click Clean report from Greenpeace has spurred companies into becoming more environmentally responsible when selecting hos