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Microsoft Sinks Data Centre Off Orkney To Test Energy Efficiency (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea off Orkney to investigate whether it can boost energy efficiency. The data centre, a white cylinder containing computers, could sit on the sea floor for up to five years. An undersea cable brings the data centre power and takes its data to the shore and the wider internet -- but if the computers onboard break, they cannot be repaired. The operation to sink the Orkney data centre has been an expensive multinational affair. The cylinder was built in France by a shipbuilding company, Naval, loaded with its servers and then sailed from Brittany to Stromness in Orkney. There, another partner, the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), provided help including the undersea cable linking the centre to the shore. "This is a crazy experiment that I hope will turn into reality" said Ben Cutler, who is in charge of what Microsoft has dubbed Project Natick. "But this is a research project right now -- and one reason we do different types of research into data centres is to learn what makes sense before we decide to take it to a larger scale."
Let the puns begin.
An idea that's all wet?
Swimming with the fishes, Microsoft?
Offshoring your data centre?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It is all about watercooling, man...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why not build data centers into the bases of offshore wind turbines. You would still get the, for all practical purposes, infinite heat sink of the ocean or large lake, cheap energy ( most of the time when the wind blows ), access for repair, and the data cable could be laid with the power cable from the turbine. Everybody wins.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.
I hope it takes more than just some scuba gear to get physical access to this data center.
Microsoft will be at the forefront of inclusion and diversity!
...instead of stealing just the data, hackers will steal the whole data center ?
Servers in data centers now are hardly ever repaired. Why spend the money? When you're running 10,000 servers and 1 breaks? What is the cost of that single unit vs the time to troubleshoot and solve the issue? All of the software and data is designed to be redundant anyways nowadays. The data will just be shifted around, and the processing load shifted as well. So having no access to fix things is mostly a moot issue. And 5 years? Thats about the max length of a server in a data center as it stands right now as it is. Overall, this sounds like a good scenario!
A Microsoft spokesman was quoted as stating that the servers will not be running any version
of Windows. When pressed as to why, the spokesman indicated reliability as the key factor;
Asked weather Bill was going to be included in the experiment, the Microsoft spokesman
briefly smiled and said "no comment."
CAP === 'abandons'
If eliminating oxygen and water from the air are so important, it would be fairly easy to seal a server behind a sheet of vinyl and purge the air inside with nitrogen. Or just fill the system with dry air if Nitrogen bothers you. The problem now is that the server exchanges air with the larger room, where people are breathing. There is no reason that professionally maintained servers need to be exposed to atmosphere outside of occasional maintenance.
"Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!" -- Ivanhoe
Making climate change worse... Sink data farms in the ocean and cause further ocean warming.
There are so many lifeforms in the ocean that people rarely see, so if this sinking data center idea takes off, the massive number of sunk data centers could affect these lifeforms and no one will watch out for them.
Yes, it might reduce the CO2 and barely warm up the sea, but there are other aspects to balancing this equation than just this.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
So who's going turn the computers off then on again when the software hangs?
That shows what happens when SJWs take over a technology company!
That's no data center - it's a Twinkie factory!
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Building & setting up this thing versus conventional. Was the energy savings net positive or negative? After all the thing is still consuming the energy to run. Only cooling has been removed. And I thought some of these server farms were already in places like Iceland where all you'd need is to open the windows.
Like cryptomining and warming the ocean for tourists.
I've been working in data centers for over 20 years and I've yet to see any corrosion on equipment. If corrosion in your data center is a problem, then you are doing something very wrong. WTF are they talking about?
Apparently MS is unfamiliar with the concept of a boat. Or security.
Why sink it? That shit sounds expensive. The only thing you're after here is free cooling; why can't it be on the shoreline, or say 50ft offshore? Stick it in a concrete bunker if you like; run a water pump or arrange for natural sea currents to do the work. It's good enough for nuclear power stations.
This sounds like a toy project.
[FrLz]
Computer equipment depreciates to zero in 2 years. If you can't upgrade the equipment, this is kind of a dead end. Better to locate near geothermal power in Iceland and air cool everything.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'm sure this is by no means the first data center sunk by Microsoft!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
you better check under the sea, cause that is where you'll find me underneath the seeaaaaaaaaaalabbbbbbbb underneath the water seaaaaaaaalaaaaaaab at the bottom of, the, sea.
Unless 100% of the power used by this kind of data center is renewable, this is like sweeping dirt under the rug. Sure, you’ve dealt with the problem of unsightly dirt on the floor, but at the end of the day the dirt is still there in the room. While dumping the heat from this thing into the vast ocean might seem like a good way to get rid of the heat, the heat remains in the system. Further, layers of ocean water do NOT mix to the point of homogeneity, so the layer where this thing hangs out is going to end up hotter by however much waste heat this thing dumps, with probably far-ranging consequences for marine ecology, changes to ecosystems we depend on to work, the possibility of mass-dyings of populations of plants, animals, fungi, changes in susceptibility to viruses by microbes without which we would all die, etc. etc. etc. according to the Law of Unintended Consequences, which states when you mess with something you can’t possibly know enough about to control all results from your messing, things you have no way of anticipating, often bad, end up happening, and of course the more widely known Murphy’s Law, which states when you sink a data center to save money on discharging heat, something will inevitably go wrong.
What, you ask? Whatever can. This is potentially going to end up being next-level bad, especially if it seems successful and free of problems, because then EVERYONE will do it, just like dumping all manner of crap into the air, imagining the environment had infinite capacity to cleanse our filth, and we wouldn’t all end up inhaling it and developing cancer, as people have. Also, yes, I know sea != ocean, but waters flow from one to the other in most instances, so the point stands.
My only hope in all this is that someone does us all the giant favor of coming along and stealing the damned thing, or cutting their cables. Rather than trying to make cooling (and thereby operations cheaper, assuring even more of these heating devices will be made, they should work instead on making them more thermally efficient, denecessitating all the efforts at cooling. Yes, I’m aware I’ve contributed to the problem by using an internet connected device, but not as much as they stand to contribute to the problem by cooking the fish while they’re still IN THE OCEAN.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
..because we're not warming the oceans fast enough already?
Well-Cache ( i.e. water well, ocean depth) - hermetically sealed hi-value water storage scheme in which any breach by design self-destructs its contents that provides a Zero risk highly secure environment. ZERO risk based on the NIST Common Misuse Scoring System (NISTIR 7864)
I guess sinking Github wasn't enough for 'em...
That's true about all computer-cooling, though...
Personally, I think, the headline should just read "Microsoft Sinks Data Centre".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Cool.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It was the data center hosting Github. They wanted to clean out all of the open source cancer.
Does the idea of warming oceans and upsetting water currents with massive undersea data centers sound bad to anyone... yet?
...but if the computers onboard break, they cannot be repaired.
If Microsoft could somehow put every copy of the Windows source code on this, then I'm all for it.
Living in a coastal town and seeing what happens whenever there is a thermal or nutritional gradient, I will watch this with a sense of humor.
If you can execute HFT arbitrage from a mid ocean sunken datacenter sitting on a fiber optic sea cable, the physics of transmission means you will win over HFT firms that have to use the whole cable.
Say if you are working high frequency trading arbitrage between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and London, sitting in the middle of the Atlantic means you can beat US domestic traders trying to work with London, or London traders trying to work Chicago.
There are other latency sources you need to account for (fiber optic repeaters, other networking gear) but raw physics says the closer trader wins the arbitrage trades. The only way to beat that would be either via shortwave radio bouncing off the ionosphere (less relay) or neutrino transmission assuming that is less than the actual achieved latency from mid-atlantic to a bourse.