Google alkoi kesällä tarjota yrityksille mahdollisuutta liittyä yritysverkosta Suomen Google Cloud Platform -pilvialueeseen. Kyseessä on niin sanottu interconnect-yhteys.

”Aikaisemmin kaikki liikenne Haminaan kiersi mennen tullen Tukholman kautta. Tämä aiheutti noin 18 millisekunnin latenssin Helsingistä testattuna”, Mehiläisen tietohallintojohtaja Kalle Alppi kertoo.

Uuden yhteyden jälkeen viive Helsingistä Mehiläisen Haminassa sijaitsevaan palvelimeen on pudonnut nopeimmillaan 3–5 millisekuntiin. Tampereelta viive on noin 7 ja Oulusta 15 millisekuntia.

The new server farm will be located in Hamina, where the American tech giant previously opened a data centre in 2011.

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Google (GOOGL.O) said it has signed a 10-year deal to buy renewable energy from three new wind farms that are being built in Finland and which will power one of its data centers.

Google described Andromeda, its latest effort to turn its massive data centers into virtual cloud computing systems customers can create and use on the fly. The company also called for smarter switch silicon to help optimize its efforts.

“The future of cloud computing is about delivering new capabilities we can’t deliver now, not delivering old capabilities cheaper,” Amin Vehdat, a distinguished engineer at Google, said in a keynote at the Hot Interconnects conference here. “The network is the fundamental barrier to delivering new features.”

Andromeda is Google’s current effort to overcome those barriers. It is essentially a central network controller and protocol, running on servers, that creates virtual systems of computers, networking, and storage as needed.

Google’s internal programmers have been able to request such virtual systems for some time. Now the company is “setting out to support external users with Andromeda, giving them the illusion of running their own networks with different address spaces and dedicated performance.”

Source: Tekniikka ja Talous
http://www.tekniikkatalous.fi/ict/suomeen+kaavaillaan+uutta+isoa+datakeskusta+ndash+millainen+vaikutus+suomen+taloudelle/a974436

Google’s data center spending and investment continues to soar. The Internet giant announced a EUR450 million (which is about 608 million U.S. dollars) expansion at its Hamina data center in Finland. This comes in addition to an already announced EUR350 million (or about 473 million U.S. dollars) investment.

Worldwide, the company recorded a whopping $2.29 billion (in U.S. dollars) in capital expenditures in the third quarter of 2013 alone, driven primarily by massive expansion projects. This further investment shows there’s no sign of this continued investment subsiding.

“As demand grows for our products, from YouTube to Gmail, we’re investing hundreds of millions of euros in expanding our European data centres,” says Anni Rokainen, Google Finland Country Manager. “This investment underlines our commitment to working to help Finland take advantage of all the economic benefits from the Internet.

Finland Project Is Very Efficient and Green

The data center is one of Google’s most advanced and efficient worldwide, employing seawater from the Bay of Finland in its high-tech cooling system.

Starting in 2015, the data center will be primarily powered by wind energy via a new onshore wind park, which was announced last June. The company will sign additional agreements as it grows to power the data center will 100 percent renewable energy.

Economic Impacts to Finnish Community

The initial construction work turning the paper mill’s first machine hall into a data center lasted just over 18 months. At peak, the new construction will provide work for approximately 800 engineering and construction workers. Currently, the facility employs 125 full time and contractor roles, which is set to expand alongside the facility.

This investment comes at an advantageous time for Finland, as the paper industry has been hit hard. Locating one of its most advanced data centers in the Kotka-Hamina Region helps boost the tech industry at large.

One of Google’s most advanced data center systems behaves more like a living thing than a tightly controlled provisioning system. This has huge implications for how large clusters of IT resources are going to be managed in the future.

“Emergent” behaviors have been appearing in prototypes of Google’s Omega cluster management and application scheduling technology since its inception, and similar behaviors are regularly glimpsed in its “Borg” predecessor, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to The Register.

Emergence is a property of large, distributed systems. It can lead to unforeseen behavior arising out of sufficiently large groups of basic entities.

Just as biology emerges from the laws of chemistry; ants give rise to ant colonies; and intersections and traffic lights can bring about cascading traffic jams, so too do the ricocheting complications of vast fields of computers allow data centers to take on a life of their own.

The kind of emergent traits Google’s Omega system displays means that the placement and prioritization of some workloads is not entirely predictable by Googlers. And that’s a good thing.

“Systems at a certain complexity start demonstrating emergent behavior, and it can be hard to know what to do with it,” says Google’s cloud chief Peter Magnusson. “When you build these systems you get emergent behavior.”

Omega was created to help Google efficiently parcel out resources to its numerous applications. It is unclear whether it has been fully rolled out, but we know that Google is devoting resources to its development and has tested it against very large Google cluster traces to assess its performance.

Google acquired in 2009, the former Stora Enso’s Summa paper. The company said at that time that it wanted to place a data center, which can also be expanded. It has already invested 350 million to this project.

Hamina data center serves the users all over the world. It currently employs about 125 people full-time.

This new 450 million will be added to this investment.

Source: http://www.iltalehti.fi/talous/2013110417681820_ta.shtml