3 ms·
Very interesting to see a lower failure rate. Is it simply a function of possibly better thermals than your average datacenter? Less EMR?
by spamizbad 6y ago
Very interesting to see a lower failure rate. Is it simply a function of possibly better thermals than your average datacenter? Less EMR?
- jacquesm 6y agoImpossible to touch it. Better (oxygen poor) environment for circuitry.
- gerbal 6y agoThe container was filed with Nitrogen, so no pesky Oxygen corroding everything.
- mleonhard 6y agoOther explanations: - Technicians were extra careful (slow) when installing the equipment. - The datacenter pod used no recycled parts. Traditional datacenters are full of recycled marginal-quality parts. Maintenance teams balance the cost of buying new parts, the cost of testing used parts, and the labor & downtime costs from recycled parts failing. Extreme reliability is already achievable but not economical. One reason why Google Search beats Bing is that Google's infrastructure software is more tolerant of flaky hardware, so Google can spend less money on hardware maintenance, reducing the cost per search. Hopefully Microsoft will release a report and tell us the source of the underwater datacenter pod's low failure rate.
- rplnt 6y agoBesides reasons mentioned in the article (no oxygen, no humans to bump into stuff), I wonder if radiation could play a role. Cosmic rays, maybe just less radio sources around (tons of other servers).
- elihu 6y agoFrom the article: >The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen was pumped into the capsule. > >"We think it has to do with this nitrogen atmosphere that reduces corrosion and is cool, and people not banging things around," Mr Cutler says. Better cooling and isolation from all kinds of radiation seem like they'd also be beneficial.