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Microsoft Serves Cloud From the Sea Bed (datacenterdynamics.com)
judgecorp writes: A Microsoft Research project to run a data center underwater was so successful the team actually delivered commercial Azure cloud services from the module, which was 1km off the US Pacific coast for three months. The vessel, dubbed Leona Philpot after a Halo character, is a proof of concept for Project Natick, which proposes small data centers that could be submerged for five years or more, serving coastal communities.
Now serving you from the blue Azure sea...
Sorry for hijacking this article, but I would like to say that since the latest takeover, we have seen much higher quality articles than we saw pre-takeover. The articles all appear to follow the "News for Nerds. News that matters." tagline that Slashdot used to follow. It is early, but I am cautiously optimistic that things are getting better.
Keep up the good work.
That's your answer to everything.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
they're going to sink the cloud. Congrats, I suppose.
Sinking computational modules is nothing new. But I really think that the excess heat could be used to serve heating purposes.
Wasting energy into ocean water is just, well... a waste.
...but I don't see any Windows on that capsule.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Maintenance must be a killer... Having to dive to fix a problem. I am not even making fun of Microsoft track record of less than stellar reliability to make 5 years of uptime seem possible.
But connections to the systems, Cable get corroded or broken.
Pirates you have millions of dollars of equipment under the sea mostly unguarded. If they may want to bring it up to steal and sell the hardware... Or they could hack into it the hard way (To get information from it)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How are they going to (cost effectively) service these machines when a hardware problem arises? It is inevitable that a power supply or drive will go bad. What about rebooting the servers when they blue screen. In a traditional data center you could get your hands on the machine when the inevitable hardware problem occurs.
So their portable data center is about the size of a container. Why not put it on dry land? Certainly renting ground the size of a container from someone has to be cheaper than running undersea cables. This seems like a stunt, not a business plan.
That is all.
One of the major costs of running a data center is keeping it cool. It's always cool (relatively speaking) underwater. You could pump sea water to a land-based data center, but that requires pumps, pipes, etc that need maintenance and extra power.
What could possibly go wrong?
...sea warming. In a few decades time we'll be surprised by the mysterious rise in temperature of the oceans. Who is the genius who suggested to put a heater like a data centre in open waters????
Microsoft has put a video on Youtube, and a new blog [post about Natick today. They are both linked from my article. http://www.datacenterdynamics.... The Youtube video is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Peter Judge
This is really old news. Using deep-ocean installations to nominally negate the costs of cooling in data centers had been around forever.
And energy-harvesting by use of undersea currents, tidal motions, or hydrothermal vents has been around forever, too. (Geothermal energy, anyone?)
This article has nothing new, but its author's suggestion that co-locating the 'pod'-type data centers near undersea thermal-emission sites is flat-out stupid. An umbilicus to land, eventually to an internet trunk-line is required. We can pipe around photons and electrons with ease. So why, oh why, was the writer forced to fill column-space with this nit-witted statement?
There are plenty of reasons to emplace various things at-depth in our oceans, simply for the heat-removal aspect alone. Below 400 m it's all pretty much below -3C. Using service-life maintenance-free modules is a great idea —It is not new.
This gives a whole new meaing to sea-sharp
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There are also MANY variations of this. For example, think about:
BLINKING!
SWALLOWING SALIVA!
HOW YOUR FEET FEEL IN YOUR SOCKS!
In conclusion, the THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING troll is simply unbeatable. These 4 words can be thrown randomly into article text trolls, into sigs, into anything, and once seen, WILL FORCE THE VICTIM TO TAKE CARE OF HIS BREATHING MANUALLY! This goes far beyond the simple annoying or insulting trolls of yesteryear.
In fact, by EVEN RESPONDING to this troll, you are proving that IT HAS CLAIMED ANOTHER VICTIM -- YOU!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Welcome to Davy Jones BitLocker matey!
Have gnu, will travel.
Really Microsoft can't you figure out a better way to cool a stack of servers? Also the waste heat could be used better, like warming a pond for fish to live in. A mile off shore? What's the point.
We can expect more 'accidental' NSA anchor drops on cables if this ramps up into production.
On April 1st, 2015 Digital Ocena released a statement to announce their new Atlantis Data Center. They saved up to 36% on cooling, unfortunately the cost of diving brought the price back up.
The datacenters being manned by humanoids or amphibians?
In other news, Farting Under Water Possible.
Windows are a reliability problem, in both undersea vessels and PCs.