Slashdot Mirror


Watch Fish Swim By Petabytes of Data At Microsoft's Underwater Data Center (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report fro Motherboard: In June, Microsoft announced that it had placed a self-sufficient, waterproof data center off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. The data center, loaded with 864 servers capable of handling 27.6 petabytes of data, represented the culmination of nearly four years of research and development on the project, codenamed Natick. The underwater data center is the first of its kind. It's a proof of concept that aims to cut down on one of the biggest costs of running a data center on land -- cooling -- and can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the world. Due to the experimental nature of the project, however, Microsoft needed to keep a close eye on its pilot project. In order to monitor the environmental conditions around the tank, it placed two cameras nearby that livestream from the bottom of the ocean 24/7.

19 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Wear birds at Trillions of micrometers on land by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Funny

    Parsing that headline took time. Time flies like an arrow.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:Wear birds at Trillions of micrometers on land by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

      If you paid attention enough, there is seemingly a lot of crap falling from above..

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    2. Re:Wear birds at Trillions of micrometers on land by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      I didn't realize there were so many fish in the ocean in that part of the world.

      There isn't. This camera is not just randomly placed in the ocean. It is attached to a large object (the data container) that acts as an artificial reef, attracting fish that school around and below it.

  2. Brings new meaning to... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2

    ... warming of the oceans....

    1. Re:Brings new meaning to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      ... fish and chips.

    2. Re:Brings new meaning to... by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

      compared to less air deterioration, it's a win.

      --
      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    3. Re:Brings new meaning to... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2

      Maybe, maybe not. I wonder about the effects upon a warmer ocean and the weather. Oversimplification, I'm sure, but mother nature can be nasty when provoked.

    4. Re:Brings new meaning to... by Lopton · · Score: 2

      If you look at this from purely an energy perspective the less energy used, the less energy there is to be added to the equation. If they put this same data center on land, they would need energy to run a cooling system, likely to include air conditioning. Since some of that energy is lost as heat all the way from production to real work, this system of placing it underwater will be devoid of those losses. In the end with less energy use, less heat is produced. So I think that is win.

  3. They could cool down even more by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Funny

    like use less CPU, by installing Linux on all the servers (they can keep the ugly colored logo though, nobody's gonna check what's inside the box down there)

    --
    Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    1. Re:They could cool down even more by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's a datacenter probably for Azure, so they might actually be running Linux on a lot of those boxes (if not all of them, and running the Windows instances in VMs).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:They could cool down even more by KiloByte · · Score: 2

      I am pretty sure they could add a remote power cut off relay to this to power cycle them...

      ... just to see Windows trying to install updates over and over. Or a STOP 0x8000003 immediately.

      Obviously, iDrac will then fail with an expired Java certificate server-side...

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  4. Re:Halted, Hanged, Slowness, ... by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

    No, but it has screen of death which color is ... like the sea!

    --
    Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
  5. Everythings fun and games by bobstreo · · Score: 2

    until an ocean floor trawler rips up rheir power or fiber.

    Or sea life (like underwater squirrels) try eating the cables. /s

  6. Re:Practical question by sims+2 · · Score: 2

    They don't.
    Everything sits as it was shipped and the reduced costs make up the difference.

    It's even filled with nitrogen to eliminate the possibility of fires.

    I'm interested to know what they are running on it. Like are they using it for commercial services? Or are they really just running through endless test cycles on 27PB of storage?

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  7. Re:And We still don't havea true waterproof smartf by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm drowning, you insensitive clod!

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  8. Re:And We still don't havea true waterproof smartf by kamathln · · Score: 2

    People who use boats often for work or pleasure often find they have dropped their phone in water. They drop it into shallows, which is usually the case as they drop phones accidentally when climbing / alighting the boats. In such scenarios, it is easy to retrieve the phone, but it would just be a brick by the time it is retrieved. The possibility of communication is vital in such circumstances where they might be traveling over water, possibly alone.What is the point of spending thousands of dollars on communication technology if the communication device is lost when it is needed the most? Precious, unreproducible data such as personal photos of events could be lost too. All this despite years of evolution of the technology?

  9. Anywhere? by VonSkippy · · Score: 4, Funny

    " and can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the world."

    Like to the Sahara?

  10. Re:Tautological pleonasm by Aighearach · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Your attempted pedanticism is false. So lame.

    Orkn means seal in Old Norse. Neyjar means islands. So the name Orkney is a corruption of the words "Seal Islands." But it does not literally mean Orkn Islands, as the name isn't Orkneyjar but merely Orkney.

    OTOH, the Old Gaelic name was Insi Orc, Island of the Orcs. But Orc in Old Gaelic means pig, as in a wild boar.

    It appears actually that the ancient Pictish inhabitants had a Boar as the symbol of their ruling noble family, and the later Norse inhabitants simply took it to mean their own similar-sounding name, Seal, based on the place-names taken out of context. And the later Pictish (eastern Scottish highlander) residents dropped part of the Old Norse word for islands, but didn't go back to Orc from Orkn.

    The phrasing "the Orkneys" is similar to that from Pliny, who called them the Orchades. But they were likely still actually called Insi Orc at that time.

    Also, when a corrupted word has a suffix particle from a different language than the root, they generally combine to form a new root word, and would need a new suffix. This is not any contradiction, just a reality of the evolution of words.

  11. Fucking Genius by nagora · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Everyone's worried about the warming of the oceans, so Microsoft puts a giant heater in one!

    Yeah, yeah - I know. But there was a day when someone said "a bit of plastic dumped in the ocean's not going to matter, is it?". It's called learning from your mistakes; maybe we should try it some time.

    --
    "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"