From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 36

earthquakes and severe climate events is taken into account in the choice
of location. Energy costs for a 24/7 operation are a key consideration
and this is leading some cloud companies to explore the novel solution
of burying facilities inside mountains close to supplies of cool water to
lessen the requirement for air conditioning. For example, Norway's Green
Mountain Data Centre is located on the shores of the island of Rennesøy,
close to a large fjord. The center itself is contained in concrete buildings
within caves built into the mountain. Racks of servers ill halls once used
to store ammunition for NATO forces, but what makes the location
especially attractive is proximity to a fjord that provides a constant supply
of cool water to keep sensitive systems from overheating. Locations like
Rennesøy provide both enhanced security and lower energy costs.
It is interesting to observe, and not a little bit ironic, that a technology
promising freedom from locational constraints is itself constrained by the
need to maximize the ability to house enormous amounts of data and
guarantee system reliability. Companies increasingly aim for the sweet
spot: cold climate, access to low-cost power, abundant water supply, high-
bandwidth Internet connections, political stability, and inancial incentives.
Several countries meet the requirements, but none more so than Canada,
which is increasingly a data-center destination of choice (Perkins 2013).
Facilities in Canada take advantage of a technology known as “free cool-
ing” that reduces energy requirements by about half through the use of
a cooling circuit that draws on outdoor air to supplement a data center's
energy-intensive needs. A specialized heat exchanger uses outdoor air to
cool water and glycol that circulate to the server racks, thereby reducing
the load on compressors and pumps, which are the big energy hogs in
data centers. IBM opened a $90 million data center in a small Ontario
community partly because the company can cool the facility for 210 days
a year without running energy-consuming chillers. While exotic locations
like mountains and fjords attract attention, Canada works for many com-
panies because practically the entire country is in a cold climate, which
means there are numerous locations near power and water supplies and
close to large cities. According to the head of one IT research company,
“The advantage Canada has is it's far cheaper and easier to bring data to
power sources, and vice versa. It's much cheaper to stick your data next to
a hydro dam” (Stoller 2012). The town of Barrie, Ontario, which houses
the aforementioned IBM facility as well as facilities of major banks, has