All your data is belong to Cthulhu.
Microsoft sinks another data centre with Natick 2
Fish already dodging trawler nets in the North Sea off Orkney found another hazard to contend with this morning: a huge white tube of servers, emblazoned with the Windows logo. Project Natick kicked off back in 2013, when a proposal for an underwater data centre caught the attention of Microsoft's top brass and led to a …
COMMENTS
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 15:43 GMT bombastic bob
4-color windows logo visible in photo
seems like someone "forgot" to use the "modern" 2D FLATSO rhomboid version. thankfully. (or was that the previous one in the photo?)
yeah, it's got a windows 7 style logo on it
But apparently it's easier to set one up underwater, than it is on land. I wonder _WHY_ that is??? [I can think of reasons, most of them political]. Natural cooling is a good thing, of course, but I think there's a lot more to it.
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 12:13 GMT TonyJ
Fish will love them.
Wherever you have anything sunk, you will get a lovely ecology grow up over a surprisingly short period of time.
Dive any wreck and you generally get loads to look at. But along with that, you also tend to get fishermen and with fishermen come the many hazards such as mono-filament.
But ecologically I don't see any harm to the immediate environment when they're down there but what happens come decommission time? They just going to rip that ecology apart or leave them there? If the latter, how will they manage potentially hazardous materials leaching out when the pressure vessel ultimately succumbs to salt water?
An awful lot of questions remain, I feel.
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 12:26 GMT Voland's right hand
But ecologically I don't see any harm to the immediate environment
Heat. If this concept goes into production you are looking at square miles of container line-ups in-between the wind turbines on some offshore bank. They will all dump quite a bit of heat into the water which will have side effects on the local ecology. All kinds of fun - algal blooms, change in fish populations, etc. Not necessarily bad ones by the way - it may in fact produce positive net effect on the environment.
I would not call it "moonshot" by the way. I would expect to see a very Azure datacenter at a wind turbine bank near you within 5-10 years. It actually makes sense if you can mass produce the pods.
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Thursday 7th June 2018 14:12 GMT EddieD
"Microsoft's Ben Cutler insists the warming effect will be minimal - "the water just metres downstream would get a few thousandths of a degree warmer at most" "
For an article by the BBC about a technology company that's not Apple, it's remarkably positive. Obviously, if it had been Apple, it would have been on the front page for at least a month, and you'd have needed kleenex to see the images.
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 12:33 GMT Captain Scarlet
20 years??
I don't think a Pentium 2 would have the grunt for the majority of bloatware out there these days.
Edit: I am making the assumption they would like to try and leave it there for 20 years with zero maintenance. If its for reusing the container then erm maybe thats ok (Not sure how long it would last in salt water without rusting)
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 12:59 GMT }{amis}{
Re: 20 years??
The BeeB had a couple more photos of the setup it looks like a cartridge system so I am guessing that the tube and cables can be hauled up and the server cartridge swapped out as a block to upgrade.
As for lifespan, the nautical stuff can easily be built to stand 20 years the company "Naval" that did the build for this unit seem to build gear for the French navy so the should have a handle on that.
PROJECT NATICK: NAVAL GROUP COLLABORATES WITH MICROSOFT TO DEPLOY UNDERWATER DATACENTER
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 14:00 GMT 2Nick3
Re: 20 years??
From the article: "...Microsoft hopes that it will tick over for five years without intervention. The target lifespan of a Natick data centre is hoped to eventually hit 20 years."
The "without intervention" is key here - no maintenance on the HW side of things. I think the 5 year lifespan would be pretty good.
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 13:23 GMT Milton
Yeah ... international waters
A whole bunch of interesting questions—
As Steve Channell said, what are the legal implications if the datacentres are in international waters?
Do we move a step closer to a data haven?
Who polices the content and function of these systems?
How does Microsoft prevent literal piracy?
What happens if some mischievous Ocean's-11 of buccaneers hauls it off and claims salvage rights?
Given that any major war would now include various navies cutting undersea cables, will there be backup connection systems?
Which precipitates some musings:
A neat place for a data haven might be orbit, or even the Moon: a high spot near a lunar pole could probably get sunlight 100% of the time, for free energy with no pollution or waste heat issues at all.
The 3-sec roundtrip comm lag would be a pain for rapid-fire browsing but just fine if you were using your self-contained lunar datacentre pod just to store data out of the reach of scoundrels and incompetents (i.e. governments).
I can even imagine a necklace of relay satellites caching content as they move in and out of a browsing path ...
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 18:56 GMT Donn Bly
Re: Yeah ... international waters
As these units are Microsoft's, under current US Law then US Laws would apply to them even though they are in international waters.
However, if they are in International waters and not "flying the flag" of a country, then they also aren't going to be signatories to any international treaties or protected by them. As such, they are probably going to be fair game for whatever country wants to take a crack at them because, if for no other reason, there isn't going to be an ambassador from another country coming around to complain about the interference.
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 13:59 GMT spold
Data transfer compliant...
Since I can process information in international waters I don't have any of those data transfer considerations/restrictions on processing - which country are you processing information in? Well none actually,,,
Ref the heat discussion your Ops people can survive on boil in the bag fish, and ready cooked crab, lobster, etc. (washed down with as much duty free as they can handle).
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Thursday 7th June 2018 01:32 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Pure PR.
"True, but beach front property costs mucho dollars but seabed costs very little."
Not all coastal land is beach front. And I bet it's not so expensive in the Orkneys anyway.
I believe there's some cheap beachfront land in Hawaii right now. Cooling might be a bit more of an issue there though,
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 15:45 GMT steelpillow
Why?
Why not just build an outer tank next to your water heater (or steam-turbine power station)? Stick the box in there and you can pre-heat your water at the same time. No salt, no hungry fish, no fishing nets. You could even drain the
swamptank and break the seal to replace dead hardware.But no, Mico-facepalm has to do it the dumb way. Some things never change, sigh.
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 17:13 GMT bombastic bob
location near power stations
one of the advantages to the big ocean 'heat sink' is for power plants also, which must (generally) put 75% or so of the energy they create into the cooling system (for typical steam plants, YMMV with other technologies).
2nd law of thermodynamics being what it is, cooling is a necessary thing in the engineering world.
But it's just as convenient to put a power plant near the ocean as it is to put a data center into it, I'd think. So with all of that infrastructure nearby, it just makes sense to locate the data centers close to the power plants. Keep it from being ugly, and surfers and beach combers won't mind. They may actually LIKE the nearby data center and infrastructure (cell towers in particular) with respect to smart phone usage, etc.. Yes, people use their smart phones on the beach. Who knew?
However, back to a previous point: never underestimate the "wacky protesters" and their money-grubbing l[aw]yers when it comes to OBSTRUCTING EVERYTHING, for bogus B.S. and irritating touchy-feely reasons. Maybe LESS of that without actual buildings being constructed, but still. SOME "bright bulb" l[aw]yer will come up with "a way" and EXPLOIT it.
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Wednesday 6th June 2018 17:37 GMT mark l 2
Surely sinking these pods out at sea is more costly than situating them on the coast with the heat exchangers using sea water to cool it. Far less costly to set up and much easier to maintain and upgrade when required.
There are already industrial areas built up around the coast such as ports and power stations which are not suitable for residential properties but usually have good power and comms already available so ideal for such ventures.