A consortium of companies is running a proof-of-concept for a turnkey cloud service delivered from a datacenter located in Iceland, powered entirely by renewable energy to help clients meet their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) obligations.

Launched as IceCloud Integrated Services, the project claims to offer a highly customizable private cloud service to meet enterprise requirements for a cost-effective scalable platform to handle cloud-native workloads, AI and other compute-intensive jobs. The claim is that it also provides lower operating costs, partly due to the cold climate.

The consortium is led by UK-based datacenter infrastructure biz Vesper Technologies (Vespertec), but includes cloud software company Sardina Systems and the Borealis Datacenter in Iceland.

Sardina's part in this is that it provides the cloud platform. This is the company's Fish OS, its distribution of the OpenStack private cloud framework, which integrates Kubernetes and the Ceph storage service.

This isn't aiming to be another public cloud platform modelled after AWS or Azure, but is targeting enterprise clients that have high-performance, time-critical workloads needing low-latency cloud infrastructure and high-availability.

There is no shortage of such facilities already, but siting IceCloud at the Borealis Datacenter allows clients to take use of energy from renewable geothermal and hydropower sources and the project has low cooling costs due to the naturally cold climate.

This is intended to help customers with their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) obligations, the consortium claims, as well as a 50 percent reduction in energy consumption during off-peak hours and a 38 percent overall reduction, which translates to lower operational costs.

"The launch of IceCloud Integrated Services represents a significant step forward in sustainable computing," Borealis Datacenter Business Development Manager Kristófer Andri Kristinsson said in a statement.

"By leveraging Iceland's 100 percent renewable energy, we are not only reducing the environmental impact of intensive workloads but also offering a cost-effective solution for enterprises looking to scale their operations responsibly."

Delivery of IceCloud Integrated Services looks to be along the lines of a consultancy; customers initially deal with a representative that handles hardware, software, and data warehousing needs, then a provider team conducts consulting sessions to design the service to their specific system requirements and workload.

Afterwards, customers receive a package proposal, and can test drive the proffered service before committing themselves, according to the triumvirate. Once on board, they get a contact person for all needs, offering the proverbial "single throat to choke".

"From a managed datacenter and/or private cloud services perspective, there is demand for these, particularly given personnel shortages in the datacenter industry," said Vlad Galabov, Head of the Cloud and Datacenter Research Practice at Omdia.

But Galabov added that when it comes to a specific setup like IceCloud, the devil is in the detail.

"I'd like to know if there are any datacenter [power usage effectiveness] commitments on top of the renewable energy, as this matters to many enterprises in Europe. Another important aspect is if Vespertec and Co will just deploy IT equipment into their datacenter or will also manage it."

IceCloud told us this is the case, and it is a fully managed service.

As to the location, Galabov notes that the datacenter industry caught onto three key benefits of the Nordic region a few years ago.

"These are low ambient temperatures enabling free cooling (therefore low PUE); abundant renewable energy; and abundant land compared to the European hotspots of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin," he said, adding that there has been significant buildout of datacenter capacity in these regions, although not so much in Iceland.

Currently, IceCloud Integrated Services is just a proof-of-concept, but it is available for customer trials now, the consortium said. Customers can sign up for the trial PoC, with some options for an extension, and that will run into full deals if they wish. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/14/iceland_dc_demo/