7 reasons why Europe really matters to cloud computing
October 8, 2012
It’s not home to Google, Amazon or Facebook, but from plucky entrepreneurs to the world’s most-advanced computing systems, Europe has a lot more to offer the world of cloud computing and web infrastructure than might meet the eye. Here are seven reasons why it matters.
Cloud computing tends to be a very North America-centric topic, if only because so many of the biggest providers of cloud resources and services are based in the United States. That’s fair enough — the business side of things is very important — but other continents, particularly Europe, have a lot more to bring to the table than just seemingly restrictive data privacy laws…
We’ll discuss many of the finer points of European cloud computing and web infrastructure at our Structure: Europe event Oct. 16 and 17 in Amsterdam, both business and technological. To whet your appetite, though, here are seven reasons why Europe is a lot more important than many people might think.
1. Clean, innovative energy
Northern Europe is turning out to be a testing ground for some of the most-innovative data center designs around thanks to its cool temperatures and abundant supply of renewable energy. Most notably, there’s Google’s seawater-cooled facility in Finland, and Facebook’s hydropowered plant in Sweden. Iceland is popular too, hosting Verne Global’s 100-percent renewable converted NATO hangar, and home to GreenQloud — a cloud provider running wholly within Verne Global’s facility and another all-clean data center by Thor Datacenter.
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/7-reasons-why-europe-really-matters-to-cloud-computing/