Cold and isolated, iceland may be the last place that comes to your mind when you think of data centres. But this otherwise well-developed island nation has started an international campaign to lure big companies to set up data centres there. The bait: a cold climate, cheap and green power and a stable economy. Iceland has timed its pitch well. PricewaterhouseCoopers recently did a study that cited Iceland as an ideal destination for data centres, much better than the US, the UK or India. Data centres around the world are also going through a serious crisis in terms of their environmental impact. The problem with data centres is plain and simple: they need too much power. "Data centres are forced to go green for economic reasons,' says Subodh Bapat, senior vice-president and distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems. The industry invented the term green data centres to denote those that do comparatively less damage to the environment. Not surprisingly, companies, such as Sun and IBM, who provide the computing infrastructure to data centres, are among those that drive the green concept in the industry. Sun has recently built a green data centre in the Silicon Valley, one among the three