Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) recently signed a partnership with Data Islandia, a data storage firm based in Iceland. The partnership will create what HDS calls the most environmentally friendly archiving service in the world.
According to the chief business development officer for Data Islandia, Sol Squire, Iceland is the best place for companies in the UK and the US to outsource their archived data.
“We have a geographic mid-point between the U.S. and Europe, sharing a common business day,” he says. “It’s very different to how someone would deal with someone in India or China.”
Iceland is situated in the same time zone as the UK (GMT) and is just five hours ahead of America’s East Coast. But one of the most important features that Iceland has to offer, is its environmentally friendly energy infrastructure and inexpensive telecommunications.
While the service wing of HDS will soon begin selling Iceland as a destination for archiving, Squire has confirmed they already have several clients on board. Although no names have been released, Squire said that governments, multinational firms, and NGOs in the UK and the US have already signed on with the Iceland archive.
Data Islandia and HDS have worked together to develop the ‘data scooter’ a device which they use to transfer disks full of information to their secure site just outside of Reykjavik. “The scooter is loaded up, we fly back with it, and it gets ingested into our data structure,” says Squire.
Customers encrypt their own data and then can access it through the Internet. The Hitachi’s Content Archiving Platform (HCAP) software allows users to search through their data as well as delete and index it.
Geothermal and hydroelectric energy which will be used to power the Data Islandia’s new data centre. “Iceland is completely zero carbon emission with regard to electrical transmission,” adds Squire, describing the operations outside Reykjavik as “the greenest managed archive in the world.”
[…] Data Islandia and Hitachi offer green data storage […]