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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.
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.
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.
But this is a sunk cost.
When the servers crash and display a blue screen it's not so evident anymore.
Cold ocean water transfers heat away from the container much more efficiently than warm air would. A cable might be more expensive than rent, but is it more expensive than rent + air conditioning?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
But this is a sunk cost.
Even so, on this whole investment, they must be... underwater.
The project is probably run by someone young, who is still... wet behind the ears.
Sorry. I'm just... fishing for karma. I'll say goodbye now... *waves*
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.