Microsoft's Underwater Data Centre Resurfaced

Oni · 09-15-2020, 11:08 AM

Sounds as counterintuitive as liquid cooling, but maybe Sinisterly will be hosted underwater one day.

Quote:

Two years ago, Microsoft sank a data centre off the coast of Orkney in a wild experiment.

That data centre has now been retrieved from the ocean floor, and Microsoft researchers are assessing how it has performed, and what they can learn from it about energy efficiency.

No humans, few failures
Their first conclusion is that the cylinder packed with servers had a lower failure rate than a conventional data centre.

When the container was hauled off the seabed around half a mile offshore after being placed there in May 2018 , just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed.

Read More: https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-...AQFKAGwASA

mothered · 09-15-2020, 12:03 PM

I actually posted a thread of when Microsoft Initially sank It.

Quote: just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed.

The mission was Indeed successful.

Jusluvn · 09-15-2020, 03:06 PM

Saw this yesterday. Pretty cool. Not sure if underwater servers are going to catch on anytime soon though

Oni · 09-15-2020, 03:41 PM

(09-15-2020, 12:03 PM)mothered Wrote: I actually posted a thread of when Microsoft Initially sank It.

Quote: just eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed.
The mission was Indeed successful.

Very cool! It rang a bell when I was reading the article, so I must have remembered your thread.

Jiggly · 09-15-2020, 05:46 PM

I love the idea, though I can see some potential problems. The failure rate is seriously impressive, but this does mean that humans can't fix or replace parts if needed. I assume something like this would need to be large scale, with seamless transitioning of data from the old servers to new, as they fail over time. I assume this would require a decent amount of ocean floor (who owns/controls that bit of ocean?) that I doubt environmentalists will be thrilled with, unless they find a sustainable way to do it.

Seems really interesting, and possibly feasible once they work out logistics and challenges.

Losi · 09-15-2020, 06:33 PM

Quite an interesting idea... Considering the entire ocean is a constant heat sink. Not a bad idea using the almost consistent temperature ocean water to cool servers. I imagine switching spinning media storage to solid state storage can reduce failure rates even further.

Frieza · 09-15-2020, 07:59 PM

I have been waiting two years to see how this brilliant idea worked out. Exhilarated to see how this affects current and future data center infrastructure design.