Perhaps inspired by the emerging data centres in Finland, Sweden and Iceland, Norwegian shipping and investment company Smedvig has teamed up with ErgoGroup, Norway’s largest provider of ICT services, to develop Green Mountain, a fjord-cooled data centre that is housed in a completely refurbished ammunition depot on Rennesøy, an island in southern Norway.
Taking advantage of the cold fjord running through the area, the data centre will be cooled by a continuous flow of 8-degree water all year round. Power will come from a low-cost renewable energy source, which means that the data centre will have a practically non-existent carbon footprint. In fact, Green Mountain claims to be greenest data centre in the world.
Once completed in 2012, Green Mountain will have over 11,000 square meters of server space, 7000 of which is designed for traditional colocation, while the remaining 4000 square meters will house container solutions.
According to Data Center Knowledge, the developers of Green Mountain are not limiting themselves to just local customers:
“We are now mainly focusing on corporate customers with worldwide facilities who wish to reduce their carbon footprint across their portfolio of data centres, improve their ‘green credentials’ and reduce spending on power,” said Jonathan Evans of Green Mountain.
Cool, green and reliable appear to be the operative words for modern day data centres. In this regard, Nordic countries are finally turning their harsh climates into a competitive advantage.
