from the Keep-your-head-above-water-not-your-data dept.
From Ars Technica, word that Microsoft is deploying pods with servers underwater.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that underwater server farms are part of the company's plans for future data centers.
Microsoft has been experimenting with underwater servers for some time.
Project Natick[*] put a server pod underwater off the coast of California in 2016. Naturally enough, the pod uses water cooling, dumping waste heat into the ocean around it. It's designed as a sealed unit, deployed for five years before being brought back up to the surface and replaced. Since then, Microsoft has deployed a larger pod off the coast of Scotland.
[*] [Natick is the name of a town in eastern Massachusetts which also happens to have a US Army Research Facility located in it. --Ed.]
The pod people are no longer people! Flash in the pan idea, or could it have some traction?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @03:54AM (1 child)
I hope somebody is taking into account the noise they produce and how it could impact sea life nearby ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @12:56PM
The heat is an equal problem if this becomes commonplace.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday November 03 2018, @03:57AM (3 children)
Pros:
Lower cooling cost.
Perhaps lower real estate cost but I doubt it, any coast where you can get fiber into the water is a high cost area to operate in vs a desert somewhere a fiber is passing through.
Cons:
Everything important has to work flawlessly for five years. Individual servers can obviously fail but the cooling system can't. The power distribution system can't so much as throw a breaker. The main switch carrying Internet in can't fail. Anything goes wrong and you have to down the entire pod of servers, raise it and pay the expense of a sea mission to service it.
Bottom line:
You had better save an assload of cash on cooling to consider doing this as a business instead of a green stunt to harvest virtue. We shall see what happens after a dozen or so attempts how many make it five years without a maintenance event. If it does work it will certainly take "Lights out management" up a notch.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Saturday November 03 2018, @04:12AM
factor in power generation from waves. There was a vertical solid-state wind generator that worked in clusters to take advantage of wind vortices. Suspended a magnetic rod in it and generated energy from the vibration. If you tie it to the ground and make them buoyant, they could rise and fall and generate energy from that.
Dunno how much gear you could power from these methods, but if you eliminated cooling costs and power costs, you just might get costs low enough profit.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @04:39AM
has to work flawlessly for five years
Heh... Microsoft
(Score: 4, Interesting) by KilroySmith on Saturday November 03 2018, @04:43AM
A lot of those issues are ameliorated if you place many pods together - say you co-locate 100 pods. You wait for 2 or 3 pods to fail, you pull the servicing ship out of the dock and replace them.
Probably have to do that someplace with a good current flowing by to avoid local underwater environmental effects from water heating...
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 03 2018, @05:28AM
Microsoft to place board members and CEO's underwater. Microsoft expects costs to plummet!
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @06:05AM (9 children)
Not really different from when a plant returns heated coolant waterto a river. And how would cooling fins deal with sea life colonizing them?
(Score: 2) by Blymie on Saturday November 03 2018, @07:35AM (8 children)
Yes, this. Sea life.
Anyone that has lived by a lake, or had a fish tank knows... warm things collect life.
These pods are going to be covered by tonnes and tonnes of plant and animal life. I mean *tonnes* after 5 years. You won't be able to find it, without following the power cord.
And I don't care if there's some special coating, it'll use cracks to cling to.
I think this is more of an R&D thing, than any real attempt. Just a 'what if'.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Saturday November 03 2018, @11:45AM (7 children)
Because there's going to be a lot of cracks in five years? As to the heat problem, one obvious solution is to occasionally make it a lot hotter. Nothing survives above about 90 C, for example.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Saturday November 03 2018, @12:09PM (5 children)
Cracks could be the slightest microscopic flake in the paint, for barnacles, mussels, seaweed or other life to cling on. They are experts at it. Making it hotter will only make the problem worse. You aren't going to heat anything to 90 in the ocean. You'll fry all the gear inside before you raise the outside temperature significantly--that's why it's placed in the ocean, after all, being a heat sink of ~infinite capacity for all intents and purposes.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday November 03 2018, @01:01PM (3 children)
khallow, as the usual apparently liberal guy who is in fact a closet commie mass murderer, has a point nonetheless. Instead of submerging equipment (the worst possible solution, in pure Microsoft fashion), you let the heat exchange get quite hot, you submerge it for 30 seconds, you make it reemerge and heat up again. Even if I don't see why growing mussles as a side business should be discounted out of principle. I've seen worse dotcom investments than that.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Saturday November 03 2018, @02:31PM (1 child)
I'm not convinced by the submerging that much, to be honest. Why not pump the seawater from a lower depth, and run it though a heat exchanger. All the equipment can be dry and serviceable, and also not in direct contact with saltwater. You would have the benefit of a larger temperature gradient by using colder water, and you can use a sterile freshwater loop on the other side of the paraflow to minimise corrosion.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday November 03 2018, @09:49PM
Well, if you make heat in cold water, you don't need to pump; the warmed water will rise, and colder water will replace it. Natural convection will do the coolant circulation for you, as warmer water is less dense and will naturally rise out of the colder mass around it. So less hardware, less energy spent. And overall, less heat produced, simply because less energy spent — the pump solution heats the water just as much, but also consumes power and generates its own waste heat.
Ideally, the servers will get more and more efficient as the designs iterate, and less waste heat will be generated. Or we can put them out in space with huuuuuge radiators, or on the moon with heat sinks jammed into the lunar surface. Or something along those lines.
There would be a bit of a latency issue to deal with... :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 04 2018, @11:48AM
Why not use oil?
https://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/cool-your-pc-by-submerging-it-in-oil-1495403/ [geek.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 08 2018, @02:51PM
And there aren't many of those produced over five years.
Volcanoes and geothermal springs do that all the time. All it takes in the case of the above heat sink is enough heat combined with a temporary disruption of convection. And you don't have to heat up your entire heat sink surface at once in order to do it so you can continue to dump heat to ocean while this is going on.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday November 04 2018, @01:00AM
Opposite direction. Encourage and nurture the life around you. Design for these conditions and create containers tied to the ocean floor, but also tethered to a large buoy. Something capable of withstanding the weight or the sea life that will live on it. The heat could be advantageous for some kind of aquaculture.
I'm thinking of a sealed column where the equipment is located that simply exchanges fluid through a large radiator. The columns themselves are something that can periscope back up to the surface via ballasts, with air provided by the buoy. All of your servers are suspended like beads and can be reeled in like multiple fish caught on a line :)
If you accounted for mean failure, and had capacity to restore machines on nearby hardware, you might get away with only occasional visits to replace beads and service whatever else. That's if there really isn't any kind of aquaculture that can be accomplished simultaneously. I'm seeing something like an oyster bar on a floating data center outside of all jurisdictions. A nice green backdrop to some new Bond movie.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @09:10AM
See that way they spark and get fried...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @09:39AM
Microsoft serving underwear? Microsoft needing soft underware? What is going on? Has Micro$erf stolen all my underwire?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Saturday November 03 2018, @12:56PM
Add one more reason for a server to be flooded: water.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 03 2018, @06:23PM
There's abundant hydropower and it is cold there.
The Province of Newfoundland and Labrador is in Canada's North-East. Newfoundland is a big island, Labrador is on the mainland.
C'mon - you know you want to.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday November 03 2018, @10:06PM
Why not just submerge them in a septic system; suits MS to a T.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2018, @11:55PM
Earth's Oceans Are Heating Up Way More Than We Thought.
https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-s-oceans-may-be-far-hotter-than-scientists-thought?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1 [sciencealert.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @12:29PM
Why don't they sell the heat instead of dumping it into ocean?