The latest developments in enterprise IT often originate from consumer services, in particular the gaming industry. As an early adopter of new technologies, the video gaming sector commonly helps to drive global innovation.
For that reason alone, it is interesting to note that CCP Games, the developer behind online title Eve Online, has decided to migrate part of its data center operations to Verne Global’s facilities in Iceland. Eve Online is a massively popular multiplayer game with hundreds of thousands of players at peak times, and therefore requires a large-scale server farm to maintain the game’s availability.
Iceland has a growing data center industry, but it hasn’t quite progressed at the rate predicted several years ago at the start of the cloud boom. The island is ideally situated to serve both the US and Europe. With multiple high performance fiber optic connections to North America and Europe, low cost natural power sources, and cost efficient ambient cooling generated from the island’s cool temperature, Iceland could be a popular choice for the power-intensive data center industry.
However, Iceland’s fiscal regime limits further growth. A number of cloud providers have held their data center plans until the government brings the fiscal facilities in line with other regions. Once that process is complete, the Icelandic data center industry may show the expected boost in green data centers.
There is also an underlying issue with latency. Despite the country’s position between two continents, Iceland is still far from the world’s major Internet exchanges. There is a chance that the level of latency could make the country less suitable for time-sensitive industries, like the gaming sector.
We will continue to watch the country closely, but for now please let us know about any latency concerns you have regarding going green on Iceland.
