Farice, an Icelandic operator of two submarine cables, has launched a seabed survey for a new direct current (DC) cable connecting Iceland and Ireland that will boost redundancy and lower the latency to UK and US, making Iceland even more attractive for data center infrastructure.
The new submarine cable, IRIS, which will be the third modern cable in use connecting Iceland to Europe, is expected to be operational in the third quarter of 2022, or within two years after the financing is secured, Farice said in a statement on its website on Monday.
It will land in Galway, on Ireland’s west coast, and Reykjanes, a peninsula in the southwest of Iceland where Advania Data Centers (ADC) operates its Mjölnir Data Center. ADC also operates the Thor Data Center close to Iceland’ capital Reykjavik.
The new cable will broaden Iceland’s spectrum of workloads
The new connection to Ireland will expand Iceland’s already strong value proposition to enterprises seeking data center services in locations that provide cost and operational efficiency as well as renewable energy to power data center infrastructure, ADC CEO said following the announcement.
“Data transfer will be faster while the redundancy of connections will provide more operational security for data center facilities in Iceland. The new submarine cable will broaden the spectrum of workloads that can be accommodated from Icelandic data center operations with lower latency,” Eyjólfur Magnús added.
Network one-way latency to London improves with the new connection to14 ms, which is well suited for most workloads and applications. Latency to New York will also improve to around 40 ms.
Companies whose power-intensive projects demand extremely large amounts of data are a great fit for Iceland’s data centers that harness renewable energy to enable globally unmatched cost and operational efficiency in collocation services.
Farice is owned by the Icelandic government that currently owns and operates two DC submarine cables. One cable connects Iceland and Scotland, with a branch connection to the Faroe Islands; the second one runs between Iceland and Denmark, with Point of Presence in various European cities.
Ireland was selected due to access to network hubs and saturated data center market
Ireland was selected because of the island nation’s access to network hubs and saturated data center market where high energy demand and increasing carbon footprint are driving prices up.
The cable will give enterprise customers already hosting in Ireland an opportunity to migrate their high-performance computing and high-density infrastructure to Iceland. Iceland is known as the world’s most operationally and efficiently optimized data center environment that powers infrastructure with 100% renewable energy sources.
Farice’s submarine cable route survey and detailed marine investigation has started from Galway to the boundary of the Irish Exclusive Economic Zone. The company has launched the survey aiming to confirm Galway as the suitable landing site for the submarine cable.
The funding towards the construction of the submarine cable is subject to the approval of Iceland’s parliament.
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