You’ve heard of the “cloud”. But, have you heard of the “ice”? New cutting-edge technology coming out of Iceland, which has the world’s largest geothermal heating system, has the entire IT sector flocking across the seas to have a look.
Because of this influx, Iceland is starving for IT Professional Services. In response, Kalles Group CEO Derek Kalles spent several days in the “Land of Fire and Ice” exploring the feasibility of setting up a co-location there to support our growing network infrastructure.
According to our overseas partner, Sigurdór Pétursson, speaking from his company’s office in Reykjavík, “We have green electricity,due to the abundance of geothermal power, and extremely good weather for data centers – even if not so much for people.”
Kalles cites the following reasons for a possible expansion into Iceland:
- Heat Management in the Datacenter is becoming quite expensive, so moving our IT operations to Iceland will help significantly reduce our IT spend on cooling technologies.
- This will be a POC and if successful, we will then market to Northwest enterprises who are struggling with the same challenge.
- Drones will be used to support ice-transporting (as part of the H2O2U project) from location to location so clients can spin up and spin down infrastructure (IaaS – Ice as a Service) and have the proper cooling within minutes, not days or weeks.
- Only risks to the plan are polar bears and the occasional ice storm, which can be managed through various methods.
When asked about the recent tech boom in this island of sub-Arctic lava, Pétursson remarks that “These last 12 years Iceland has been roaring ahead. Someone called it bumblebee technology: scientifically, aerodynamically, you cannot figure out how it flies, but it does, and very nicely, too.”
According to Statistics Iceland, “New private limited companies increased by 5% over the last 12 months, from March 2014 to February 2015, compared to the prior 12 months. There were 2,046 new registrations in that period. The highest increase of new registrations was in professional, scientific and technical activities, 43% increase over a 12 months period.”
The success of Iceland’s recent IT boom is a metaphor for Iceland’s broader achievement: harnessing the harshness of nature and transforming it, through invention and hard toil, into rich, fruitful energy.
Also, Iceland has Björk.