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Project Natick: Microsoft's Underwater Data Center
- quanticle 11y agoGiven how much heat racks of servers on land generate, I don't understand how they can claim that there is no heat being added to the ocean.
- wavefunction 11y agoI think at a more simple level, why exactly would anyone want to establish a data center in one of the more inhospitable corners of the globe for any reason other than heat exchange?
- whithajess 11y agoLand costs?
- TranquilMarmot 11y agoWhy not put data centers in Antarctica? Plenty of cold cold land there.
- evanb 11y agoInternational treaties have established that Antarctica is exclusively for science, and not for private use.
- cooper12 11y agoLatency for one thing, as the article mentions
- udkl 11y agoLast I heard, Microsoft actually was thinking of putting a data center on greenland back in 2007-08. Maybe they already have a 'secret' unannounced private data center there.
- smoyer 11y agoI came here to say exactly the same thing ... it requires a lot more calories to heat up water one degree Celsius than it does air but the heat still has to go somewhere.
- nemothekid 11y agoAn interesting question would be, how much heat do all of the world datacenters produce and how much energy would it take to raise the average temperature of the Ocean by 1 degree?
- wavefunction 11y ago1 degree is a pretty large change
- tlb 11y agoThe world's oceans contain 1,335,000,000 km^3 of water. Heat capacity is 4.2 KJ / liter / C. So it requires 5.6e24 joules to heat the oceans by 1 C. The world generates 20,000 TWh of electricity per year, and maybe 10% is for IT. That's 7.2e18 joules of electricity / year in IT. So it would take 780,000 years to heat by 1 C. Or 780 years to heat by 0.001 C. Other sources of global warming are far, far worse.
- vectorjohn 11y agoAnd that's if it was a closed system with no other sources or sinks of heat.
- quanticle 11y agoThe problem I'm concerned about isn't raising the average temperature of the ocean. The problem I'm concerned about is localized heating. Marine life is far more vulnerable to rapid temperature changes than life on land. We've seen dead zones developing in the past downstream of power-plants, as the warm water discharge from the steam turbines raises the temperature of the water and reduces its oxygen carrying capability. My concern is that if we put datacenters in the ocean, they'll create localized hot-spots with much the same result.
- rch 11y agoExactly - this is probably a very bad idea, even if it seems like only muck-dwelling worms and the like will be affected.
- edgyswingset 11y agoSimply put, the ocean is a massive place with so many factors at play (like underwater currents bringing in cold water), that the heat generated by a ton of small "micro" datacenters will be pretty inconsequential.
- justizin 11y agoThis is precisely the sort of logic that has since the beginning of time led to us treat the ocean as a huge garbage can, and a massive amount of it has died in the past 100 years. Seriously, watch Mission Blue. Sylvia Earle has more dive hours than anyone, ever, and thusly personally mapped a great deal of the ocean and has since watched those places die.
- vectorjohn 11y agoThe data center generates the same amount of heat no matter what. It doesn't matter where it's generated. So unless you're arguing that we shouldn't have data centers, I don't understand your point.
- quanticle 11y agoI agree that the data center generates the same amount of heat no matter where it's placed. But like we've seen with power plants, heating water tends to have far more serious environmental consequences than heating air. If we place a full-scale datacenter in the ocean, will we end up with fish-kills and dead zones like we see downstream of powerplants from time to time?
- aaron695 11y agoBecause it's powered by wave energy. They take the energy (Ie heat) from waves and power computers. Energy (heat) in = Energy (heat) out. If you had some electricity left over and shipped it out you'd be able to cool the oceans.
- n0us 11y agohttp://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appears-ebook/dp/B006ACIMQQ http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appea... This reminds me of a book I read recently in which they put the servers on barges. I was an entertaining read, 1/1 would recommend.
- steckerbrett 11y ago> 50% OF US LIVE NEAR THE COAST. WHY DOESN'T OUR DATA? It's corrosive, expensive to get things to and from it for replacement, leaks destroy the hardware, it's not close to power generation, internet access needs cables because RF doesn't penetrate water, everything is going need watercooling which is rather expensive.
- Spooky23 11y agoSeriously. It's a proposition obviously cooked up by someone who has never spent more than a week's vacation by the sea.
- cududa 11y agoWell Seattle is right by the sea, so..
- hueving 11y agoMicrosoft isn't in Seattle, so...
- cldellow 11y agoIt's a 20 minute drive from Redmond to Seattle. It's a 3 hour drive from Seattle to the ocean.
- nwhybrid 11y agoOk someone has never been to Seattle it seems. It's not a 3 hour drive to the ocean.
- tiff_seattle 11y agoWith minimal traffic, it is: https://tinyurl.com/zbkp89q https://tinyurl.com/zbkp89q
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- rottyguy 11y agoWould putting a big data center underground work? (ala geothermal cooling?)
- eru 11y agoYou've heard of geothermal heating? Of course, the ground can be reasonable cool, if you don't go too deep. The problem is, the heat will mostly stay where you put it---the ground is bad for actually moving the heat away.
- rottyguy 11y agoIIRC, in geothermal cooling, don't they pipe liquid to disperse the heat to the surrounding ground? Also, earth homes?
- cjfont 11y agoI'm still not sure why one would want to place the data center at the bottom of the ocean. I would think that the disadvantage of not being able to perform maintenance for 5 years would be more significant -- can't they just create the data center near a water source and pump the water through pipes that run across a heat exchange on the backside of the servers?
- m_mueller 11y agoYour idea is what's being done at the largest computing center in Switzerland, the CSCS. They pump water from the relatively deep Lake Lugano [1]. Europe's currently fastest supercomputer (world No. 7) is hosted there. [1] http://www.cscs.ch/cscs/an_innovative_centre/cooling_system/index.html http://www.cscs.ch/cscs/an_innovative_centre/cooling_system/... [2] http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/ http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/
- jsprogrammer 11y agoI assume it is for space reasons. You could put down a data center in a harbor, for example. The amount of metal that would be required to scale this model to that size, however, seems excessive.
- aaron695 11y agoEnvironmentally pumping heat into a river would not be though acceptable I would think, so the water source probably is the ocean, running pipe across beach front property might not be as doable. > perform maintenance for 5 years would be more significant They would be built like Google, you don't waste money doing maintenance. I think the main issue is it's unusual and as such costs of complexity and legal come in.
- mmel 11y agoThe main advantage I would think that is not mentioned is mitigating the price of real estate in expensive regions like Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco etc.
- jorangreef 11y agoI came here to say the same. Cities with expensive real estate are often the cities where latency matters even more. This is essentially a datacenter that can be dropped in the ocean, rent-free.
- fudgy73 11y agoRegarding real estate - what entity owns the portion of the sea where the data center is located? Is there security? Curious how this would work in terms of property law.
- yardie 11y agoWhy not just build down. Datacenter and car parks below ground, retail at ground level, housing and offices at higher levels.
- eachro 11y agoHow long till we start putting datacenters in space? 20 years?
- evanb 11y agoWith no convective medium, the primary cooling mechanism in space is radiation, making it no so easy to keep computers cool.
- malloryerik 11y agoSure, some heat will be added to the ocean. But land-based data centers add heat to the environment and also need to be air conditioned. One question, what happens when there's a tsunami? This is a particularly relevant question on the US west coast: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-to-stay-safe-when-the-big-one-comes http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-to-stay-safe-when...
- jwcacces 11y agoPresumably nothing. Tsunamis are a problem where the ocean meets the coast, almost nothing is going on when the water is deep.
- rtkwe 11y agoA tsunami would have relatively little effect on a pod suspended/anchored to the sea floor. They only get violent when they reach the shallows and come onto land. It'd have more effect on the shore connection point where the data and power go into the ocean. These could be buried up to the shore though and anything above ground secured in a sealed bunker though that doesn't solve the problem of keeping the pods powered through the power outage after a tsunami.
- malloryerik 11y agoThat's somewhat reassuring (there's thought to be a 12% chance of a Cascadia mega-quake and accompanying west coast tsunami in the next twenty years).
- rtkwe 11y agoYeah the main factor in how much will a large wave or tsunami affect a structure at sea is how deep is the water the object is in. Out in the deep ocean the surface swell is less than a meter and the wavelength is huge (200 km or so long) so the change is relatively gentle and gets subtler as you get deeper. It's really neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami#Characteristics
- deftnerd 11y agoAt first I was concerned that there would be so much humidity inside of the capsule from the condensation caused by the temperature difference between the outside and the inside, but I see they've addressed that by replacing the atmosphere with Nitrogen. I wonder if they've considered an inert fluid to immerse the computers in? If you can use something like Fluorinert, or even high-grade mineral oil, you might be able to make the vessel not required to withstand crush forces as high since the fluid in the capsule can be at the same pressures. I do love this idea because they can start putting data centers along of submarine cables. One in the middle of the Atlantic, between London and NYC would be great for HFT traders. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA wouldn't love something like this too. A whole data center on cross-oceanic cables would provide a lot of infrastructure they can use to analyze traffic in real-time.
- malloryerik 11y ago"A whole data center on cross-oceanic cables would provide a lot of infrastructure they can use to analyze traffic in real-time." And plenty of room for submarine cat-and-mouse. Guess it'd have to be inside US waters.
- ksec 11y agoI remember something similar has been tested out by Intel. No idea why the concept didn't went further.
- vectorjohn 11y agoI'm not sure what nitrogen has to do with humidity. I don't think anything. If humidity was the problem there are other ways to deal with it (the water doesn't come from nowhere, and once it's gone, you won't get any condensation anymore). Sounds like (pressurized) nitrogen had more to do with increasing the air density for heat transfer. But I still don't know why they chose nitrogen.
- ihsw 11y agoYeah I'm not sure what it has to do with it either, desiccants[1] are nothing new and they are the standard when it comes to humidity reduction in shipping. You might be familiar with those little packets of silica beads in foods and computer components that say "DO NOT EAT" on them. That said, nitrogen-refrigeration is commonly used for temperature control. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiccant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiccant
- RyJones 11y agoNatick is a town in Massachusetts, as the FAQ says; it's also the home of Natick Labs, which over the years has done interesting R&D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Natick_Soldier_Research,_Development_and_Engineering_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Natick_Sold... ETA: that's what I get for typing mindlessly instead of cutting and pasting.
- jolux 11y agoMassachusetts, not Maryland. I live right next door to Natick. Read that Wikipedia article more carefully.
- roymurdock 11y agoI live on Lake cochituate in natick. The fish still contain unsafe levels of toxins from a Natick Labs accident on the bank of the lake in 1984. Interesting choice of project name.
- gberger 11y agoIt kinda sounds like nautic
- wpeterson 11y agoI grew up in Natick, surprised to see this as a codename. Is there any connection or just a weird coincidence?
- whalesalad 11y agoTalk about a Digital Ocean.
- zitterbewegung 11y agoIs the white paper that they mention on the website publicly available? I think it would offer more information than the website so people would understand the rationale for this investigation.
- udkl 11y agoThey should think of how to handle security. There is a risk of not just industrial sabotage, but international espionage & terrorism.... and of course... Tom Cruise.
- buzzdenver 11y agoMS is misunderstanding what deep learning is :)
- ceejayoz 11y agoI'd imagine the NSA would be pretty happy about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
- sandworm101 11y agoI don't get it. If this is all about heat, I would think that putting the data center beside the ocean and then pumping seawater around to cool things would be far easier than sinking the entire kit. Even if they really really want to be underwater, I'd assume digging an artificial lake and pumping water in and out would be easier than dealing with an actual ocean.
- Caprinicus 11y agoIt's probably more of an exercise than anything else I imagine it would be better for maintenance to use the seawater to cool the coolant itself, that way they aren't pumping salt into their datacenter.
- ihsw 11y agoEh, I think it's indeed more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else, but personally I cannot support enough our encroachment on the ocean. It truly is the last frontier on the surface of the Earth that we have yet to reliably explore. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have a lot more potential to expand our understanding of this planet and I think it is exciting. Just because we can't go there doesn't mean we can't tap into its power. At the risk of sounding like a BBC documentary, the oceans are the engine of this planet and they deserve to be investigated thoroughly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation
- TranquilMarmot 11y agoThe "Leona Philpot"? Surely a reference to the "I Love Bees" ARG for Halo 2? http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Leona_Philpot http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Leona_Philpot
- taspeotis 11y ago> "The first prototype, affectionately named Leona Philpot — a character in Microsoft’s Halo video game series..."
- TranquilMarmot 11y agoOh... I should really pay more attention :)
- matheweis 11y agoThis sounds like a great idea, kind of. I'd be seriously concerned about the immediate environmental impact. Otoh, volcanic vents are hotbeds of life, so maybe it'd be ok.
- lossolo 11y agoCooling for free
- kregasaurusrex 11y agoWhy don't datacenters of scale use a fluid specially designed for heat dissipation that doesn't damage components like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ErbZtpL88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6ErbZtpL88?
- late2part 11y agoMicrosoft loves to hype these things; remember container data centers? It all makes for nice reading, but I suspect their TCO is crap.
- fowl2 11y agoSOMA flashbacks Watch out for that structure gel!
- pqhwan 11y agoCame in here looking for SOMA reference. I'd imagine a data center would sort of work as its own ARK, though (Not to mention the petabytes of sensitive, personal, possibly secret documents, pictures and videos for your perusal).
- dang 11y agoSee also http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumb... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008851). Since the current post is more of an original source and is currently ranked higher on the front page, we treated that one as the dupe and merged its comments here.
- YesProcrast 11y agoA clever idea. People are wondering why such a thing might be useful, so let me advance a theory: Latency. Suppose you have a bunch of people somewhere, say, the US, and a bunch of other people somewhere else, say, China, and there's an ocean in between. If they need to work collaboratively on something, placing a datacenter in one country or the other yields asymmetric latency; someone has a lot more. If you can just plop a datacenter exactly at the midpoint, everyone wins. It needn't be the biggest datacenter ever, just one that can handle the latency-sensitive tasks. Neat project.
- mc32 11y agoThey pretty much say why in the project page: renewable energy [tidal, currents?] and cooling. The third, as you mention is latency --they want to be where the people are. Plus, at depth, storms and typhoons don't affect things all that much, it's rather calm. So, the main threat might be from saboteurs rather than natural disasters [beside the salty environment] because beside a coast guard at the surface [which if contraband coming in is any proxy, it's pretty porous], you don't have a "police presence". So they'd have to rely heavily on monitoring systems.
- cm2187 11y agoSharks love to chew oceanic cables! If you need to fix something while the datacentre is in the middle of the ocean, the cost and time will be a multiple vs if it just off the coast.
- dogma1138 11y agoThat's true for copper cables not so much for fiber optics ;)
- rgbrenner 11y agoI think you have the backwards -- sharks aren't attracted to copper cables.. but are attracted to undersea fiber optic cables.. because they carry high voltage power (for the undersea repeaters), which emits an electromagnetic field that attracts the sharks: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/08/15/sharks-chomping-underwater-fiber-optic-cables/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/08/15/sharks-... http://bgr.com/2014/08/13/google-underwater-cable-network/ http://bgr.com/2014/08/13/google-underwater-cable-network/
- secstate 11y agoHa. With the project name, I somehow kept expecting this thing to be off the coast of Boston. Took me a while to realize it was off the West Coast :)
- wpeterson 11y agoThis is a nice PR piece but building operational systems in a marine environment usually requires hardy engineering, equipment, and constant maintenance. It's not a friendly environment. I can't see the benefits here, if they want water cooling colocation with hydro-electric or other freshwater flows seem much better.
- jmspring 11y agoWorking for the company, I really really f'n hate this website.
- codeddesign 11y agoI'm surprised that no one has commented at all on climate change. Having a data center in a body of water would surely heat up that body of water to a certain extent - even if it's just the surrounding area which can cause dramatic effects to the water, life, and relative climate/weather patterns.
- kordless 11y ago> 50% OF US LIVE NEAR THE COAST. WHY DOESN'T OUR DATA? Regardless of the effort and results, I think they should reconsider putting an illogical and patently false statement at the header of this article in attempt to gain interest about it. Some of my data, or more specifically "my data" lives in my house, in servers in my garage. While the collaborative argument has some merit in proposing splitting latency differences, I think the vast majority of "our data" should end up living near where we are. That results in a better question to ask, and that's "Why do people tend to put their data where they don't live?" Following, one may ask "Are there valid business models that can be created to help people put their data near where they live?"
- antmldr 11y agoData Sovereignty? Could this, for better or for worse, allow Microsoft to completely dictate the terms of how it stores and manages its data in international waters?
- fiatmoney 11y agoHa. In "international waters", you're at the mercy of whomever has the strongest navy - usually that means to USA. Especially when they can make an at-all-plausible case that you're in some sense US-flagged.
- fiatmoney 11y agoIt seems like putting this in freshwater would help with a lot of issues. A data center in say Lake Huron gets you relatively low latency access to a lot of US & Canadian population. Putting it in an artificially dammed lake on a river gives you free-ish power & cooling (and probably population proximity as well, since river-side areas tend to be densely populated).
- frik 11y agoChanging the water temperature locally more than a few degrees has bad effects for the environment. Keep that in mind.
- krick 11y agoFirst thought as well. I mean, those datacenters on land also are pretty bad (especially compared to how "useful" they are in the most common cases), but that thing in the sea is somehow a bit more scary for several reasons. But then I'm thinking: there are volcanos deep in the ocean, and life around them is surely different than in colder areas, but it doesn't seem to have much impact on larger area. It surely depends a lot on where you place your datacenter, but, theoretically, it should be possible to make it harmless. The other thing is that of course tech giants placing their datacenters under the water won't care a bit about correct placing, and in the end there won't be anyone to stop them.
- zmanian 11y agoWhen the USS Jimmy Carter[1] splices an intercept into an undersea fiber optic cable it probably leaves something similar to this behind of locally filter the data and only uplink relevant data. Makes you wonder what vendors the Navy uses and if MSFT is using the same. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/new-nuclear-sub-is-said-to-have-special-eavesdropping-ability.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/new-nuclear-sub-i...
- krick 11y agoSpeaking about effectiveness and stuff: I am still amazed how these modern bootstrapy landing pages, that, in this particular case, basically contain nothing more than text and a couple of pictures, can make browser noticeably slower. I mean, yeah, it works, can be built quickly and, since users are used to it — nobody really complains. If it would be some yet another tiny startup, I wouldn't even bother to comment. But when it's a landing for some futuristic Microsoft project, which is about doing significant work to achieve relatively small improvement in something, and which is very likely to be non-environmentally-friendly… Really, just look at it. Enjoy how scrolling up and down makes your browser lag. And then look at the source. Just marvelous.
- vayeate 11y agoIt's rendered entirely with JavaScript, has images (and gifs), and an iframe with a Bing map on it, some sort of plugin for "Azure Media Player", and it appears to also have some scrolling-based JavaScript. It's a good example of an obese website: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
- leaveyou 11y agothe lack of diversity in that team is astounding ! not a single eastern european there.
- porker 11y agoWith the layoffs in the oil exploration industry and the knock-on effects for engineering firms who helped with undersea exploration this is great timing from Microsoft. Cheaper labour/costs to pick up the technology needed.
- JorgeGT 11y agoSomewhat unrelated, but nice endorsement of Grafana! http://www.projectnatick.com/images/gifs/grafanaloop.gif http://www.projectnatick.com/images/gifs/grafanaloop.gif
- emiliobumachar 11y agoI hate to be the cynical in the room, but this smells like tax avoiding.
- janfeb 11y agoWill there be any noise pollution?
- rdl 11y agoIt would be pretty amazing to put servers undersea in the middle of an ocean for transaction efficiency reasons -- say between NYC and LON directly on the straight line path. The crazy thing is there probably are financial market applications/HFT where having processing power exactly equidistant between to market centers with the most efficient path would make sense. (Running microwave instead of fiber, to get 1c vs. 2/3c, would also be interesting, but there are different engineering challenges there.) Amazed Microsoft didn't mention this.
- doublerebel 11y agoCooling data centers with seawater is not new, Google has been doing it since at least 2011. There are many ways to mitigate the corrosive effects on the equipment. "For instance, Interxion uses materials like Cunifer and titanium, which will last approximately 10 years in seawater." [1] There also are many tried and true ways to manage the heated water so that it is safe for the environment [1, 2]. "We pump that seawater through cooling modules - which are direct water to water heat exchange modules - and then the water is gravity fed from the cooling modules back out to a temporary building, which serves the purpose of mixing incoming seawater with outgoing return water, so when we return the water to the Gulf it is at a temperature more similar to the incoming water." [2]. I'm sure Microsoft was aware of all this before publishing their report. Good on them for thinking creatively. [1]: http://www.datacenterjournal.com/industry-perspective-seawater-cool-data-center/ http://www.datacenterjournal.com/industry-perspective-seawat... [2]: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/power-cooling/googles-finland-data-center-pioneers-new-seawater-cooling/32932.fullarticle http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/power-cooling/googles-finl...
- cm2187 11y agoCan't all the pipes and valves be made of plastic?
- dogma1138 11y agoSea water decomposes plastic faster than it corrodes metal. This is one of the issues with plastic pollution of the oceans they break down release nasty chemicals and end up as micro plastics. Most plastics will decompose under a year in the oceans turning it into soup basically. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090820-plastic-decomposes-oceans-seas.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/08/090820-plast...
- mhandley 11y agoInteresting - I didn't know that. But the article you cite says it only really happens in tropical waters above 30C (86F). Is there evidence plastic decomposes in sea water in cooler climates?
- cm2187 11y agoWhat I don't get is how do you swap a disk? A datacentre requires pretty much constant maintenance. I guess a robot could swap a disk. But we are talking about a pretty costly equipment then.
- ggsp 11y agoFunnily enough, this was sort of predicted in a paper[1], even though the intended use there would have been HFT. [1]www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf
- uglysexy 11y agoMicrosoft trying to be relevant/interesting. This is worse than Zune. I just might short MSFT tomorrow morning. > you have a bunch of people somewhere, say, the US, and a bunch of other people somewhere else, say, China > If you can just plop a datacenter exactly at the midpoint That would be Hawaii
- dogma1138 11y agoWould be quite interesting to see what exactly comes out of this. If the datacenter will be located in international waters it can pretty much chose the country which it belongs to as it will have to sail under a flag (this effects stationary ojbects also e.g. oil rigs in international waters). Now every country can claim upto 200KM as their exclusive economical waters so it will still be under the jurisdiction of the country to which those waters belong to unless MSFT plans to really put the datacenter in the deep ocean. On the side and more hilarious note if anyone hacks a datacenter in international waters they've technically committed piracy so I wonder how will this effect the NSA :D Although the downside of this is that countries can board and search vessels under the laws of the sea quite easily if they are in international waters.
- snarfy 11y agoSeems like a bad idea to dump waste heat into the ocean.
- rbanffy 11y agoIt sure saves on cooling, but watching someone trying to replace a failed drive will prove entertaining.
- Qworg 11y agoOP here (and member of the Project Natick team) - the site has been updated with our video, and there's now a blog post with some more information: http://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-research-project-puts-cloud-in-ocean-for-the-first-time/ http://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-research-projec...
- akshatpradhan 11y ago>Project Natick reflects Microsoft’s ongoing quest for cloud datacenter solutions that offer rapid provisioning, lower costs, high responsiveness, and are more environmentally sustainable. I don't understand how an underwater data center would help with that >The vision of operating containerized datacenters offshore near major population centers anticipates a highly interactive future requiring data resources located close to users. Deepwater deployment offers ready access to cooling, renewable power sources, and a controlled environment. I don't understand why that needs to be done in an underwater data center. >Enables rapid response to market demand, quick deployment for natural disasters and special events such as World Cup. I don't understand how an underwater data center solves that. >Latency is how long it takes data to travel between its source and destination. Half of the world’s population lives within 200 km of the ocean so placing datacenters offshore increases the proximity of the datacenter to the population dramatically reducing latency and providing better responsiveness. Let's imagine you throw an underwater data center in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea to provide access to everybody. How is that more advantageous to just building the data center on one of the islands? Overall, I guess I don't understand why we need an underwater data center, like at all. Is it mostly because of advanced cooling capability?
- soulus 11y agoGoogle Earth Amazon Fire Apple Air . . Microsoft Water?