Data Scooter provides missing link in Iceland's green datacentre vision

The credibility of Iceland as a provider of green datacentres powered by geothermal energy and capable of storing huge quantities of electronic data for firms in Europe and North America could be about to take a major step forward, according to Icelandic data storage specialist Data Islandia and its partner Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

Iceland has long been touted as a potential "datacentre capital of the world " with IT experts claiming that the country's geothermal energy and low temperatures represent the perfect location for server farms under growing financial and environmental pressures to curb energy use.

However, the country's emergence as a datacentre location has been hampered by concerns over bandwidth and the speed with which data held in Icelandic facilities can be accessed.

Now Data Islandia and HDS claim to have developed a work around to the problem with the launch of a new disk-based storage device, known as a Data Scooter and designed to ferry stored data between companies' own datacentres and Data Islandia's new Icelandic storage facility, scheduled to be completed later this year.

"It can take up to three days to transfer a petabyte of data by cable," explained Sol Squire, managing director for offshore operations at Data Islandia. "By putting the data on the Data Scooter and flying it [to Iceland] you can complete the data transfer in less than a day."

The system will allow firms to encrypt and transfer the estimated 75 per cent of data that they store, often under legal obligation, but rarely have to access. The data will then be physically moved to Data Islandia's new zero carbon datacentre near Reykjavík airport where it will be transferred onto the company's disk-based storage systems and archived so that the data can be quickly recovered if required.

Squire insisted that the approach was both cheaper and more secure than sending the data over cables. "The data is encrypted, it travels with a security guard, it doesn’t go through [Heathrow's] Terminal 5," he said. "We also only delete the original version of the data once the transfer is fully complete."

Additionally, the whole system – which is the size of a medium-sized coffee table and can be easily transported by one person – is ruggedised to withstand a fall of up to 50ft and can operate in extreme temperatures.

Alec Bruce, ecosolutions champion at HDS which developed the technology alongside Data Islandia, said that a strong sales pipeline was already in place for the new service, particularly among telco, healthcare and banking firms, which are facing increased regulatory pressure to store data but are finding that energy costs and planning restrictions are constraining their ability to expand their existing datacenters to meet those legal requirements.

"People's attitudes are changing," added Squire. "There used to be a sense that you should never send data outside your own datacentre, but people are realising that approach is a horribly expensive option and the security is now there to enable transfer of data to more appropriate, environmentally friendly and cheaper locations."

He added that the Data Scooter could also be used internally by firms looking to transfer data securely between different datacentres.