Verne Global

The diminishing availability of power to an increasingly expanding European data center industry is causing users to re-look at their long-term data center strategies, especially for power-intensive computational work such as HPC. This is particularly the case within research circles and with the lack of supply, data center costs across Europe have increased significantly over the last decade, to the point where the cost of power has risen above that of the facility itself

At Verne Global, we provide access to Iceland’s advantageous power profile. This encompasses abundant, 100% renewable hydro-electric and geothermal energy, all delivered by one of the world’s most reliable and scalable grids. And, crucially, offers savings of up to 80% when compared with continental Europe. Uniquely, Verne Global is able to offer this exceptional power profile via 15-year contracts – providing long-term, forecastable data center pricing security.

Ultimately this means research institutes, laboratories and universities can spend more of their research budget on the actual ‘science’, and less on the power-bill, while also dramatically reducing their research carbon footprints. And for Verne Global, our exceptional, secure power profile, allows us to focus on delivering, creative, flexible and market leading platforms for those customers. In doing so we have launched a cloud platform and high performance computing as a service. This supports our customers, whose infrastructure can flex as their needs mature.

Verne Global’s core business provides data center services – power, cooling and building infrastructure, which supports the customer’s HPC equipment within the racks. This service is wrapped with service level commitments attuned for HPC operation and supported critically, by Iceland’s power profile and free air-cooling capability to servers. Our R&D on this HPC data center platform has been based on our experience with research customers, evolving the technical solution to deliver reduced resilience for compute at lower cost and maintaining Tier III resilience for the storage racks.

By combining the savings from much lower energy costs, free-air cooling and reducing the data center resilience where appropriate for the compute racks, the total cost of operations (TCO) outcome is significantly lower than these organisations experience within their existing supplier provided data center facilities. To put this into some context, a data center delivering 1MW of IT load with 80% utilisation, will cost €2million/annum, in Iceland this will cost €1million/annum.

Verne Global is fully focused on HPC and HPC users. We optimise our customers’ HPC requirements to ensure the most efficient, low cost and appropriate technical outcome. Our objective is to help our customers realise more research output, more sustainably within our Icelandic data center. An example of this is demonstrated through our work with the UK’s Earlham Institute. For more information please read their case study: www.goo.gl/11DFSi and watch their video: www.goo.gl/GN7Tsj