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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.
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.
...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.
in this sort of virtualizarion hosting environment, you don't fix it. If it can't be resolved remotely you simply take it offline and permanently shut it down, much like bad sectors on a hard disk or SSD get remapped and excluded.
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.
When the servers crash and display a blue screen it's not so evident anymore.
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.
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
You realize a large chunk of their cloud business is running Linux VMs, right?
I wonder if Microsoft is doing this for legal reasons. If the go far enough from the shore, they're in international waters, and are not subject to national laws anymore.
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.
International Waters are 12 miles, not 3/5 of a mile.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This is probably why Google's Servers are in shipping containers, if they ever need to get out of the country just throw them on a container ship.
Soo.....what's the benefit of having it below water, offshore?
I'm assuming, heat dissipation. I have a thought: could the column of steam rising out of the sea above a really big server farm be usable, given an onshore prevailing wind, to increase rainfall in dry places like California?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Depends where you put them. Might be a shame off the coast of Alaska, but off the coast of Florida it would be pointless. Still, even in a cold climate, it may not be worth the heating benefits when much of the heating comes from the units that cool the servers, takes a lot more energy (generally) getting "wasted" heat than means to generate heat directly. I'd bet there's little savings if buildings are being heated with natural gas (compared to not having to cool the equipment at all).
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Hello, and THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING
Yes that's right, THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING. Why you might ask? Well it's simple!
Your brain usually takes care of breathing FOR you, but whenever you remember this, YOU MUST MANUALLY BREATH! If you don't you will DIE.
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.
It is measured in nautical miles = 1.15 mile = 1.852 km
By the way one knot = one nautical mile per hour.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Soo.....what's the benefit of having it below water, offshore?
If you think a little bit, you would know the answer right away. If not, read TFA or the quote below from TFA.
The sea provided passive cooling, but further tests this year might place a vessel neare [sic] hydroelectric power sources off the coast of Florida or Europe.
However, my concern is that they are short-sighted in their research (quoted below from TFA).
The group put one server rack inside a cylindrical vessel, named Leona Philpot after a character in the Halo Xbox game. The eight-foot (2.4m) diameter cylinder was filled with unreactive nitrogen gas, and sat on the sea bed 30 ft (9m) down, connected to land by a fiber optic cable.
According to a report in the New York Times, the vessel was loaded with sensors to prove that servers would continue working the vessel wouldn’t leak, and would not affect local marine life.
What they did was deploying only ONE vessel, and then claimed that there is NO EFFECT on marine life. But then they are talking about MASS PRODUCTION. I understand that in a very small scale, there may not be any effect, which is similar to geothermal. However, what would be the effect for having plenty in one area (which seems to be common sense when deploy)? Increasing only a couple degree Celsius of sea temperature in one small area could effect marine lives living in that area, e.g. Shark ( http://shark.ch/Information/Se... ). They have not experimented this but rather claim that it is OK to do so already...
Prefab means they can be deployed relatively quickly. You can prefab on land, but you still need to lay foundations... and these wouldn't be permanent; when you wanted them gone, they'd pack it up and remove it, leaving no trace.
Maybe not permanent, but designed for 20-year residence, with 5-year hardware rotations. It's enormously more expensive to build a watertight submarine than a waterproof house, so you're going to want substantial lifetime to recover that extra margin. Water-tight seals, corrosion resistance, pressure proof to say 3-4 atmospheres. The actual chamber isn't flooded, so there's still a big air space and a thick steel plate between your hot processor and the cool water.
I can see where the real estate to plant these things might be cheaper than downtown San Francisco. They're still going to need some kind of shore facility to house routers and power.. Nor do I think there are that many real-world installations that regularly go 5 years without any hardware maintenance.
Seems like a neat toy. Or a publicity stunt. I'm glad someone has so much cash lying around that they can investigate wholly impractical applications, but no one who knows anything about water is likely to go anywhere near this. If you need fast and impermanent, put a shipping container in a parking lot. If you want passive cooling, find a parking lot in Anchorage or Edmonton.
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.
http://natick.research.microso...
Now, I wonder how the cooling is done.
Achille Talon
Hop!
We can expect more 'accidental' NSA anchor drops on cables if this ramps up into production.
Yeah, last time I went swimming in the ocean I was scalded by the not quite boiling water...
Except that didn't happen, because the ocean is still cold.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
30.3086
Kid-proof tablet..
But for absolute certain, every person who suffers any degree of flooding damage within a thousand miles will be sueing your nuts off for actual, consequent and exemplary damages.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Maybe they want to hide that fact.
Not gonna get that hot, under 30 feet of cold water with a gradual current.
Windows are a reliability problem, in both undersea vessels and PCs.
Would those be the same people who were going to sue for carbon warming causing eternal drought?
This went to court. And the water companies almost won, until the trial judge started to lead the water company's barrister up the path of "it's your water as soon as it falls from the sky ... therefore, if it floods someone's house, or leaks through their roof, it is YOUR property, and therefore YOUR fault.
The barrister dropped the case with between minutes and seconds to spare before the case was found in his client's favour, with the consequences.
This was in the late 1980s or so. The barrister has saved his employer's many billions of claims since.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Interesting. Here in the US, Colorado has the same weird water law. There are people there who could use that barrister.
There's nothing to stop them using the argument though. Whether it works under the property and tort laws of Colvada or wherever your problem is ... you need a local lawyer.
You noticed how the commonest pre-politician employment of politicians is "lawyer" ; and who do you think they write laws to benefit?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"