This December Icelandic atNorth will open its new Sif data center in Stockholm, Sweden. The data center offers the same next-generation facilities and services that have proven so successful in Iceland. In a press release atNorth states: "The future of AI and ML means that customers need more – so Sif has been designed to deliver just that: more".
A very, very brief history of data centers
To understand what a next generation data center is, it helps to understand what came before them. The first generation of outsourced data centers were focused on strengthening operational resilience through co-location. This was a relatively cheap solution, helping to better balance OpEx and CapEx.
In addition to co-location, second generation data centers are focused on connecting environments to reach the cloud and to deliver digital services. In essence, customers pay for improved connectivity – and this tends to be relatively expensive.
What is a next generation data center?
The new generation of data center built by atNorth offers all the features and functionality of its predecessors and additional capabilities to support future demands. All future workloads will require more computing power – and the new generation of data center has been designed to cope with these demands. Indeed, it will become a pre-requisite in the digitalization journey, as businesses move towards building advances applications, including AI and ML.
“We are seeing customers moving towards more intensive workloads that demand an all-new infrastructure for optimal operations. They want more power, physical space, and the option to massively scale their footprint as resource requirements change,” says Stefan Jofors-aTribe, Nordic Sales Director at atNorth. “Competing data centers built on previous generation technologies and concepts simply cannot deliver what will be needed for the ML-AI future”.
The Sif facility is optimized for high-density operations, but clients have the option to start small and scale up as demand for capacity and power increases.
By maximizing efficiency, atNorth delivers more power, capacity, and scalability for our customers at a lower cost, overcoming the shortcomings of previous generation data centers. Supporting new technologies allows us to drive costs lower still – savings that we then pass on to our customers so they can maximize ROI.
Icelandic knowledge tailored to the Stockholm environment
The Sif facility has been built using all of atNorth's Icelandic data center knowledge but tailored to the Stockholm environment. The location, in the north of the city, has been specifically chosen because it allows atNorth to recycle the heat generated within the facility, feeding it back into the municipal heating network. The press release does not mention if this is actually happening or if it is a possibility. At full load, the facillity could return 11.2MW of energy into the system.
