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?
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.
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.
You are right. Helsinki/Espoo, Tampere or Oulu would have been far better choices from the point of recruitment but this is a large piece of land and probably Google didn't want to let it go.
Besides they must have thought the name Google is enough to get smart people where ever they want.
I assume they are getting a big chunk of local/national/eu grants to support the depressed area and a quick pass on building/environmental permits which you wouldn't get for building it in the capital.
Plus as the article says - this is really the St. Petersburg/Stalingrad/Leningrad data center without the political problems of having to keep renaming it.
There's a data center in Lenoir, NC which they spun as a way of training and employing laid-off furniture / textile mill workers. The fact that this is in a paper mill shut down two years ago makes me think they would try to do something similar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
Yes, but it's still a massive body of water. Local heating of the water may be an environmental issue (although a small one, I think), but heating of the entire Baltic Sea is absolutely negligible.
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+).
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.
>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.
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?
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."
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&...