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Microsoft Serves Cloud From the Sea Bed (datacenterdynamics.com)

Posted by timothy on from the hard-to-tell-if-it's-raining-there dept.

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.

7 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Sorry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Sorry by The+Evil+Atheist · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm pretty sure it's a cognitive bias rather than a real pattern you have spotted there.

      --
      Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
  2. Open Waters.. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Open Waters.. by knightghost · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Modern data center modules no longer require physical maintenance. You load up on redundancy based on MTTF, turn it on, administer remotely, then replace the entire thing in 5 or so years. Redundancy and replacement is cheaper than maintenance.

    2. Re:Open Waters.. by Critical+Facilities · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I agree. I also have to say that this qualifies for the "just because something is difficult to do, does not mean it's worth doing" award. I honestly do not get the fucking point. They say it's to potentially serve remote areas. With what ? A can under the ocean, with some servers and drives in it? I mean, if it has a fiber line going to the local network on the island or whatever, OK, you have your connectivity to land, but what about everywhere else? Are they gonna splice into an intercontinental backbone cable?

      I guess I just don't get the value. If it is intended to be a node to connect that remote area to the internet, then I would ask why put the node connection underwater (and inaccessible, as you point out)? Wouldn't it be easier, cheaper, faster to deploy that on land?

    3. Re:Open Waters.. by The-Ixian · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, something tells me that if this was Apple or Google doing this, the sentiment would be a lot different...

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
  3. Old News by Sir+Holo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.