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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: 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...