Green Data Archive in Iceland

Data Íslandia, a data archive in Iceland, and Hitachi Data Systems are going to jointly sell data storage services powered by green energy. The system is being offered for archival data, which in IT terms is more than six months old (archivists think in decades).

Data Íslandia and Hitachi are arguing that online disk drives are cost effective and environmentally sound for this application, compared to off-line storage on tape or optical disk. One issue which does not appear to have been addressed is the inefficient way office documents are formatted. Reformatting of the documents would likely achieve a reduction in size of an organisation's word processing documents by 90% to 99%. Making their documents one hundredth the size before they archive them would provide significant financial and environmental savings.

Hitachi Data Systems and Data Íslandia Partner to offer Large Volume, Long-term Data Archival Services to Multinational Organisations in Carbon Emission Free Facilities

... Data Íslandia has established facilities in Iceland with 100% green energy to offer international archival services for sensitive digital information with an emphasis on scalability, security and privacy. Using technology from Hitachi, Data Íslandia manages archived data for optimal compliance, risk containment, governance and operational advantage. The facilities are powered completely by geothermal and hydroelectric energy, making Data Íslandia’s services the greenest in the world. ...

Analysts estimate that up to 70% of data stored by organisations is more than six months old. Much of this data must be retained for compliance purposes but it is generally stored inefficiently, offers very little business value stored on tape, and takes up a great proportion of the available power, space and management resources. By removing archived data from the corporate network and cost-effectively storing it on disk, organisations benefit from reduced power consumption and cooling, increased space, better compliance with corporate regulations and far better use of resources. ...

Data Íslandia will use the Hitachi Content Archive Platform as the core digital indexing and archival platform, and will utilise Hitachi’s flagship storage system, the Universal Storage Platform™ V, for the storage of the archived data. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform offers numerous benefits including native content archiving, sophisticated policies data lifecycle management and compliance, petabyte scalability and the ability to migrate seamlessly across generations of storage technologies using the virtualisation capabilities of the USP V. ...

From: Hitachi and Data Íslandia Launch the World’s Most Environmentally Friendly Outsourced Data Archiving Service, Hitachi Data Systems, Stoke Poges, UK and Reykjavík, ICELAND, Dec. 6, 2007