Google's new data center in Finland | Hacker News Reader

Google's new data center in Finland

royal.pingdom.com

92 pointsdrtse438 comments

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&...

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

Interestingly, Nokia started off as a Finnish paper mill.

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

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

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

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

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

To fulfill your curiosity - No. I knew it beforehand as I'm a Finn myself.

And here's the first logo of Nokia. It's quite, uhm, interesting compared to what they're doing at the moment, wouldn't you agree http://www.about-nokia.com/images/nokia-logo1.jpg

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?

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.

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.

btw this is what centre of Hamina looks like : http://torikamera.haminetti.net/user/toricam.html

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.

http://www.google.com/datacenter/lenoir/jobs.html

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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+).

> 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

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

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?

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?

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."

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