Analyst firm Gartner says European service providers can cut their colocation expenses in half by moving to Northern countries, thanks to low electricity costs and a favourable climate.
Although cloud service providers continue to focus on Frankfurt, London, Paris and Amsterdam, electrical power in those cities is increasingly pricey compared with that in countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, which have plenty of renewable energy - and chilly outside air which means data centers don't need active cooling, Gartner has pointed out.
It's not grim up North
"It’s important to weigh up several key decision factors when considering moving workloads away from the major colocation hubs to Northern Europe,” said Tiny Haynes, research director at Gartner. “However, in most organizations there are several IT functions such as data warehousing or browser-based apps that simply do not warrant the significantly increased running costs of colocation in a major hub."
Power costs in Norway and Sweden have fallen by five percent since 2010, said Haynes, while the EU average has risen by around 13 percent in that time. This has led to Facebook planting two data centers in Sweden, and other notable builds including Green Mountain's Rennesøy site.
The analyst did point some possible downsides. Remote locations may have greater network latency, but this is only important for applications like VoIP systems and virtual desktops. Some applications need to be located close to other connected systems - and of course moving North might be impossible where data protection laws require storage in your own country.
A series of recnet announcements aimed at allowing data soverignty have included a new IBM data center in Paris, and Amazon opeining in Frankfurt, while Microsoft is considering a German-only cloud.
Moving data centers Northwards has been known about for some time, of course. Gartner only mentions it now, because it has a Data Center Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit in London, November 24-25.
While we are plugging events, we're sure readers are well aware of our own event, DCD Converged, which takes place the previous week, also in London, on November 19-20.