Hidden inside a Norwegian mountain a new data center is under construction. When completed it will provide an estimated 21.000 square meters (226,000 square feet) of space, naturally cooled by water in a adjacent fjord, making it the worlds most environmentally-friendly data center. The Rennesøy fjord supplies water at a around 8 degrees Celsius, a temperature ideal for a data center, witch makes the placement of this new construction a stroke of genius. It benefits both the environment and the data centers financial department at the same time.
When housing thousands of servers in one location, cooling is always a problem, and this makes location planning key. Traditional cooling systems both racks up cost, and could potentially come with a host of problems if a failure to the cooling occurs. When administrating a data center you need to think about redundancy for the general power supply and network connections to the whole data center, both internally and externally, but also redundancy for the cooling systems with build in safeguards for eventual failures. Removing the cooling from the equation makes perfect sense, and makes the administration a lot easier, and one less thing to worry about.
The new Green Mountain data centre is located in the municipality of Rennesøy, only a 30 minute drive from the centre of Stavanger. It has direct power lines from several power stations at a close distance, and is connected to the central Norwegian network. Using three independent or partially independent supply lines and with access to uninterrupted supply from 8 independent generators, the site boasts an extremely high level of power redundancy. The power is also generated with the use of renewable energy as much as possible. Green Mountain will also have a good connectivity to the rest of the world with multiple high capacity lines to: Oslo, directly to the UK and also to continental Europe.
