Data Center Locations: Advertorial
in Helsinki. Working in cooperation with ICT service provider Academica Oy, Helsingin Energia has reduced CO2 emissions from computer hall cooling by 80%.
Academica’s computer hall is situated in Helsinki, in cave premises in the Uspenski bedrock. The heat produced by the computers is piped into the district heating network to heat up buildings and domestic water in the city. The computers are cooled by district cooling produced by heat pumps, cold seawater and thermal energy from energy generation that would otherwise be wasted.
Beneath Helsinki lies a ready-made district cooling and -heating network and an abundance of subterranean premises. At its current capacity, Helsingin Energia can direct 100 MW of district cooling to datacenters. This volume is equivalent to district heating output that could heat a town of 30,000 inhabitants. “It is possible that in the future, a significant proportion of the buildings in Helsinki will be heated by thermal energy generated by datacenters,” says Juha Sipilä.
Fortum has also developed cutting edge energy solutions for two larger and exceptionally eco-efficient datacenters currently under construction in the city of Espoo in southern Finland. The first is a 50,000 server datacenter being built by Tieto, the leading IT service company in Northern Europe. Tieto’s datacenter is cooled by thermal pumps and the 30 gigawatt hours of heat it produces – equal to the annual heat energy consumption of approximately 1,500 detached houses – will be recovered for Espoo’s district heating network all year round.
“The amount of heat recovered in the district heating network will be the highest ever achieved with a solution like this. The energy solution will decrease the carbon dioxide emissions of district heat produced in Espoo by almost 10,000 tons a year,” says Jussi Ojanen from Fortum. The second datacenter, owned by Elisa Corporation, a leading Nordic communications services provider,
will also
reduce Espoo’s carbon dioxide emissions by about 7,500 tons a year. Without the linkage to Fortum’s storage systems for district heating and cooling, the datacenter would ordinarily generate about 2,000 tons of greenhouse gases annually.
Greenfield or Google-style Anyone who has driven a car in Finland in any
direction for more than two hours can testify that this country has one small population for a whole lot of land – ideal for Greenfield investors looking for privacy and space for their datacenter. Land is also relatively inexpensive, which is why a picturesque lakeside holiday cottage is a must for any self-respecting datacenter manager living in Finland.
Alternatively, Finland can offer a choice of industrial sites like former paper mills, which have integrated CO2-free electricity from the grid and cooling solutions on-site. Tailored services can include excess heat recovery through
heat pumps, absorption cooling,
dynamic or static UPS, and reserve capacity generators on-site. This ensures a highly cost- efficient energy supply with no capital required from the data center owner.
Google considered many alternative sites in different countries for its 200 million euro datacenter before opting for the former paper mill in Summa, located in the Hamina region of south-eastern Finland. “We were the first people in the world to think of putting a datacenter in a paper mill,” says a proud Timo Antikainen from Invest in Finland. Google loved the idea and construction work on the 125 hectare site should be completed in 2011.
What makes this datacenter special is its sea water cooling system that produces no emissions, a solution described as “elegant” by Joe Kava, who is responsible for turning the former paper mill into what he says will be one of Google’s, and the world’s, most energy efficient datacenters. In addition to the proximity of the sea, Google was also impressed with the business environment and energy supply at the Finnish location.
Another paper mill site in Finland has been snapped up by the CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd, which is establishing a highly eco-efficient datacenter in Kajaani, northern Finland. The facility will be jointly constructed by CSC and the UPM, one of the leading forest product companies in the world, and will provide a state-of-the-art environment for supercomputers, data storage, and other demanding IT systems. Construction work will be completed in early 2012.
Currently the biggest datacenter in Finland belongs to HP, which has located more than 50,000 servers inside the solid bedrock of Vantaa,
near the capital city Helsinki, in what is one of the company’s largest facilities in Europe.
The future is Green and Finnish Newsweek loves Finland – and datacenters love being next to Russia. In August 2010, Newsweek ranked Finland as the best country in its study on health, education, economy, politics and quality of life around the world. “Newsweek did forget to mention something important, however,” says Timo Antikainen. “Finnish laws guarantee first rate security for data. Unlike some Western democracies that give a legal right for the authorities to spy on data, Finland does no such thing and we are proud of it.”
Several Russian companies are currently thinking about locating their datacenters in Finland for this very reason. The strategic location of Google’s new Finnish datacenter, just 35km from the Russian border, is also unlikely to be a coincidence.
Antikainen believes that Finland is ideally placed to respond to the major trends driving the datacenter business, like the greater focus on publicly reported PUE values, high density systems, and new methods for utilizing energy for maximum benefit and minimum waste. “The combination of low energy prices, free cooling and advanced infrastructure to utilize excess heat offers a sustainable competitive edge for datacenters located in Finland. And that is good news for both profits and the environment.”
According to the latest forecasts, the global carbon footprint of datacenters will exceed the airline industry by the year 2020. “Our considered view is that your new green datacenter should already be operating in Finland by then,” says Antikainen. n
Invest in Finland as a governmental organisation
helps visit
www.investinfinland.fi or contact: Timo
Antikainen,
foreign companies
to find business opportunities in Finland. To learn more please
Vice President,
Business Development tel. +358 10 773 0319,
timo.antikainen@
investinfinland.fi
www.datacenterdynamics.com 35
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