Google's new data center in Finland

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/09/15/googles-mega-data-center-in-finland/

by drtse4 • 16 years ago

92 38 16 years ago

royal.pingdom.com

nirmal• 16 years ago

Google plans to employ 50-60 people to run the data center. So far they have found four, so they have some head hunting to do.

Google Maps says Hamina is a 2 hour drive from Helsinki, can any Finns comment on if this is an accurate time? Or is it one of those 6 months of the year the roads are dead sort of thing?

avar3• 16 years ago

If you look closer at Google Maps you'll see that the road from Helsinki to Hamina goes past several other cities, and it looks like this: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

It's hardly some dirt road in the middle of nowhere, so yes, 2 hours is probably accurate.

sushi2• 16 years ago

Yeah It's almost 2 hours 15 minutes drive from Helsinki but driving is the only option to reach Hamina. There is no rail system connecting Hamina (there was one, no longer operational).

I have been closely following the news about this particular datacenter and it really is strange that Google hasn't found enough engineers for the job there. I have been seeing the ads for the jobs at Hamina datacentre since last one year or so.

zeemonkee2• 16 years ago

I've only been to Hamina once (nice harbour BTW) but I don't recall if there was a university or technical college there. I'd have thought Helsinki/Espoo, Tampere or Oulu would have been better for communications and near to recruitment grounds.

zeemonkee2• 16 years ago

Sounds about right. Finnish main roads are surprisingly good all year round, and cars by law have to use special tires during the winter season.

avar3• 16 years ago

Google page about the data center: http://www.google.com/datacenter/hamina/

I can't see it on Google Street View, unless it's that area of tents on the map. But I don't see anything that looks like a paper mill there.

Maybe they just dropped the marker in a random location.

Edit: Yes they did, here's an actual Google Maps link: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=60.536944,27.116944...

The street view doesn't show the location, just a guarded gate into the area.

Here's a Finnish Wikipedia article about the site (with the coordinates): http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summan_paperitehdas

And Google Images of the site: http://www.google.fi/images?um=1&tbs=isch:1&sa=1&...

drtse4• 16 years ago

Looks like it is/it was a geocaching location http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=f13ea...

mhb• 16 years ago

How big an issue is corrosion when using sea water for cooling? I thought this was why fire departments don't use salt water to put out fires.

Retric• 16 years ago

They probably use a two loop system so most of their pipes are not filled with salt water.

The_Fox• 16 years ago

Additionally, they can use sacrificial anodes to reduce corrosion and apply an electric current to reduce growth of living things.

j-g-faustus• 16 years ago

Yes, that's what they are saying in the linked video, around the 1-minute mark: http://www.hs.fi/talous/artikkeli/Google+raotti+ovea+hakukon...

  [We will be] taking the heat outside of the building and 
  using cold [sea] water to remove it

So it could mean air cooling inside the building, using salt water to cool the air.

kiiski• 16 years ago

Also remember that the Baltic sea is a lot less salty than any other sea. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_sea#Salinity

jparise• 16 years ago

Interestingly, Nokia started off as a Finnish paper mill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia#Pre-telecommunications_er...

Alleyfield3• 16 years ago

What's even more interesting is that prior deciding to produce mobile phones - Nokia's biggest asset was producing rubber boots.

Ras_• 16 years ago

Nokia's product line up in 1936: http://www.flickr.com/photos/puijo/4997269178/

MikeCapone• 16 years ago

I think this was mentioned in a recent issue of The Economist.

Just out of curiosity, is this were you found out about it?

Marticus• 16 years ago

I believe this is the final answer for water-cooled systems, haha.

paulitex• 16 years ago

Was anyone able to glean Google's plans for the huge volumes of heated sea water 'waste'? I sure hope they're not planning on just pumping it back into the Baltic - warming of the world's oceans and seas is a very serious problem (see http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/temperature-ocean-... for a summary).

It seems this only shifts their heat dissipation problem from having to cool servers to having to cool large quantities of sea water. Perhaps the latter is an easier problem to solve (gigantic outdoor cooling tubs?) but I don't know.

jonknee• 16 years ago

Many power plants heat sea water (either for steam or cooling), I think the ocean can handle a data center just fine.

Update: I should add that I'm all for environmental study to make sure that they aren't venting it out in a sensitive ecosystem or at a radically different temp. Done correctly this can be an important development towards sustainable data centers.

Alleyfield3• 16 years ago

We're talking about the baltic sea here. Its average depth is 55m.

Besides, it's already quite contaminated so there is a lot of environmental protection going around it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/BalticSea...

As you can see, there really isn't places for the water to flow back and forth, so it's not a case of "the ocean is going to handle it"

Always consider the context.

jdminhbg• 16 years ago

This would have to be one hell of a data center to have an appreciable effect on the temperature of the Baltic Sea.

chewbranca• 16 years ago

In the video linked from the article, they mention that they are going to pump the outgoing water around the complex back to the sea and it will be nearly the same temperate as the sea water when it reaches back. I imagine they are going to use the cold air of the climate to reduce the heat.

uvdiv2• 16 years ago

>I imagine they are going to use the cold air of the climate to reduce the heat.

No, they are discharging heat into the sea. Their outlet water is "nearly the same temperature" because the amount of water involved is immense (the article says the seawater intake is 2 meters wide). A large amount of heat, divided over a very large water flow, is diluted into a small temperature increase.

hoprocker• 16 years ago

It's definitely important to do a measured environmental review when installing a large infrastructure.

However, the world as it stands now is going to have data centers, and these take energy. Direct environmental cooling undoubtedly has less of an impact than producing energy, powering a compressor, and using that to cool circulated air. Think of the relative number energy conversions (0 vs 2+).

uvdiv2• 16 years ago

> I sure hope they're not planning on just pumping it back into the Baltic

Of course they are. Direct ocean cooling is common for power plants much larger than a data center, and the effect on water temperatures overall is trivial.

For some perspective. This data center may produce 10^7-10^8 watts of heat. A power plant may produce 10^9-10^10 W. The solar heating of the Baltic sea is 3x10^13 W. (337,000 km^2 x 100 W/m^2)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Insolation.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea

icco2• 16 years ago

I'm kind of confused why we care. It's another data center, big whoop. I am worried about the waste from warming sea water, but other than that, meh?

jodrellblank2• 16 years ago

If you don't care, why comment?

I am impressed at Google putting datacenters in cold climates for cheaper cooling. You know they have enough datacenters and custom software that they can migrate heavy compute jobs around the planet, keeping them running in night regions where the temperature is lower and cooling cheaper?

icco2• 16 years ago

It's not that I don't care, I just don't understand why this is news. I'd love to know if what you claim they are doing is actually happening, but I didn't see that in this article. From what I can tell, all this article says is "Google is creating a new data center and it is cooled by the ocean."

herdrick2• 16 years ago

I've been wondering for a while why Google and others don't put data centers in Iceland. Electricity there is almost free of charge and has zero carbon footprint - in fact zero emissions of any sort. (It's geothermal.) The location is remote so you would have some extra latency but for lots of stuff that'd be fine.

jodrellblank2• 16 years ago

I wont find it on my iPhone, but there was a recent article about companies doing just that, datacenters being built and fast links run to the UK and mainland Europe.

It's quite remote from a get-servers-and-techs there perspective too, though. Might not get a 4 hour onsite warranty as easily.

avar3• 16 years ago

Iceland has horrible network connectivity compared to the mainland, and I don't think Google needs to do that much batch-only processing for it to pay off.

This is also pertinent: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/datacenter/how-to-kill-the-datacen...

iuyhgtfvgbhjn2• 16 years ago

Poor international connectivity.

Small country, where do you hire a lawyer with expertise in Icelandic IP law? How much jurisprudence is there?

Do you trust the government given that they just basically walked away from their bank guarantees

herdrick2• 16 years ago

I don't think you would need IP lawyers to set up and run a data center. And yes I do trust the Icelandic government.

Google's new data center in Finland

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