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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: 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... :)