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."

Comments

Even better

[Big Bipper]

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.

Repairs

[darkain]

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!

Re:Repairs

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Do you have any idea how cheap it is to hire a warm body, even if they got the super duper awesome A+ certification, to maintain thousands and thousands of servers? At a university, we pay ours $11/hour for less than ten hours per week to service a thousand servers. He pays for himself many times over every week compared to letting even a single server go unrepaired.

Let's say you can't get labor that cheap and your version of cheap labor costs $30/hour with benefits (keeping in mind that this is just slightly more than a menial job to diagnose and replace DIMMs, motherboards, hard drives, etc so $30 is too much IMO). For 1000 servers you probably need much less than ten hours in a typical environment, but let's round up to ten. That's $300/week. If he fixes just one $5000 server per week, he has paid for himself even if he's on Facebook during times when nothing is broken. We are an HPC center and stress these servers to the max, so we do have multiple parts failures in a typical week.

What morons just let servers die and throw them away when all you need is a replacement DIMM? I realize that some people are stupid or just haven't done that math but wow, that sounds idiotic to just throw away servers when it's *much* cheaper to fix them. (And yes, I realize that having to dive down to the data center wouldn't be a cheap or viable solution, so my math doesn't apply in the case described by this article).

"Microsoft sinks data center"

[Locke2005]

I'm sure this is by no means the first data center sunk by Microsoft!