There is a giant new data center campus planned in Norway, making use of all the traditional benefits of the climate and energy of Northern Europe.
This isn’t the kind of festive story you may be expecting. The proposed NO1 campus won’t be draped with icicles, and accessible only by sleighs pulled by reindeer. Norway may have territories stretching up into the Arctic, but this site is located near Kristiansand, in an area called Vennesla. That’s in the South of Norway, roughly on the same latitude as Inverness in Scotland. They get some snow there, but mostly just rain.
The facility is about 500 miles south of the really cold ones. Facebook’s Lulea data centers, are in Sweden. Along with the independent Node Pole close by in Boden, they are are genuinely close to the Arctic Circle.
Here’s the story. Norwegian logistics firm Bulk Property makes and manages warehouses. It reckoned that making accessible and adaptable buildings was a good skills base to build data centers.
It’s got big plans. It spent three years finding the right site, and reckons this could be bigger than Facebook’s effort. employing thousands where Lulea gives work for around 900.
Vennesla has cheap long term prices for electricity (because Norway can husband its hydro and buy wind power when it’s cheap). And Bulk’s NO1 site is next door to a 3.6GW international power hub.
It also has good fiber connectivity to Europe and the rest of the world - or it will when Bulk upgrades infrastructure linking it to Oslo.
The weather is cold enough for free cooling - and that rain has an added advantage. Any building in the area can collect enough rainwater for adiabatic free cooling, without having to have it piped in.
The site has one more thing that Bulk’s Mark Ruff is very keen on, however, and that is on-site recycling.
This is the logistics guy speaking. Data centers have an upgrade cycle, with new kit coming in every three years or less, and old equipment moving out. As well as the IT stuff, this may include racks, and other new structures, as groups like Open Compute come up with better ways to power and cool the servers in data centers.
The Vennesla site has a recycling plant. Old hard drives can be securely dismantled, and old servers can be stripped of anything of value there. Tenants won’t have to worry about paying to ship their old servers miles to be disposed of according to local laws.
There is something festive about recycling. I think this each year, surrounded by Christmas wrapping paper, tinsel, cardboard boxes and left-over food, or heading to the bottle bank on New Year’s Day to shatter some hangovers.
Recycling is part of the lifecycle of any IT hardware, and it should be included in any green data center’s plans - and if not, it needs to be in your New Year Resolutions.
Happy Holidays, and Merry Christmas, to you all.