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Microsoft Data Storage

Microsoft Sinks Data Centre Off Orkney To Test Energy Efficiency (bbc.co.uk) 155

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea off Orkney to investigate whether it can boost energy efficiency. The data centre, a white cylinder containing computers, could sit on the sea floor for up to five years. An undersea cable brings the data centre power and takes its data to the shore and the wider internet -- but if the computers onboard break, they cannot be repaired. The operation to sink the Orkney data centre has been an expensive multinational affair. The cylinder was built in France by a shipbuilding company, Naval, loaded with its servers and then sailed from Brittany to Stromness in Orkney. There, another partner, the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), provided help including the undersea cable linking the centre to the shore. "This is a crazy experiment that I hope will turn into reality" said Ben Cutler, who is in charge of what Microsoft has dubbed Project Natick. "But this is a research project right now -- and one reason we do different types of research into data centres is to learn what makes sense before we decide to take it to a larger scale."
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Microsoft Sinks Data Centre Off Orkney To Test Energy Efficiency

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  • Let the puns begin.

    An idea that's all wet?

    Swimming with the fishes, Microsoft?

    Offshoring your data centre?

    • Let the puns begin.

      It is all about watercooling, man...

      • It is all about watercooling, man...

        So, since they're cooling PC boards, is it ....

        waterboarding?

        • waterboarding?

          That's true about all computer-cooling, though...

          Personally, I think, the headline should just read "Microsoft Sinks Data Centre".

      • Re:Watercooling (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @03:43PM (#56738632) Homepage

        Never mind the puns, how long before somebody steals it?

        A bunch of Somalian fishermen with a supply of large inflatable bags will have that thing off the sea floor in no time.

        • It looks pretty heavy. It's also not very far out to sea, so I doubt you could steal it without anyone seeing and it wouldn't take MS very long to notice an entire datacentre dropping off the Internet and sending someone out to take a look...
          • Well yea, but by the time they take a look it is gone. Maybe they put a battery backed up GPS and a pressure sensor in the can. That will tell them immediately if the can moves more than expected.
            • I doubt you can get it very far in the time that it takes to send a security guard or the police out. The thing is several tons and you can't just drag it through the water, you need to lift it up onto a boat, during which point you'll trigger all sorts of alarms (vibration, motion, shock).
        • All it needs is an anchor dragged across the cable. I hope this flops, the oceans are already heating up enough, no need to accelerate this.
        • by Cederic ( 9623 )

          You must be American. Somalia is a 9000km boat ride from Orkney, assuming they use the Suez canal and don't get arrested or sunk on the way.

          I'm thinking there are easier ways for them to earn a living.

          Shit fuel costs and canal fees will be higher than the value of whatever they dredge up.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      It's missing a key device diver.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Shark Week's coming soon!
      Azure vs. the Great White
      Can Megalodon do Office365?
      Teaching Sharks to Surf (the Internet)

    • by Thud457 ( 234763 )
      That's your solution to everything. Under the sea, its not going to happen.
    • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @04:26PM (#56738912) Homepage Journal

      Microsoft has been sinking data centers since NT.

  • Even better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Big Bipper ( 1120937 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @12:48PM (#56737448)
    Why not build data centers into the bases of offshore wind turbines. You would still get the, for all practical purposes, infinite heat sink of the ocean or large lake, cheap energy ( most of the time when the wind blows ), access for repair, and the data cable could be laid with the power cable from the turbine. Everybody wins.
    • Good point!!!
    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      plus they can use the fan for cooling

    • If you read Microsoft's news article on this [microsoft.com], the point of this project isn't to cool a datacenter using the ocean as a heat sink. It's to build a self-contained datacenter which can be customized to order, is easily shipped (fits on the back of a truck), then deployed at the bottom of the ocean where it operates for years without human intervention. All you need to do is plug in the power and data cables to something onshore.

      I suspect putting it at the bottom of the ocean is more about preventing peop
      • the point of this project isn't to cool a datacenter using the ocean as a heat sink. It's to build a self-contained datacenter which can be customized to order, is easily shipped (fits on the back of a truck), then deployed at the bottom of the ocean where it operates for years without human intervention.

        So why put it at the bottom of the ocean? Why not in a container near the ocean? In most of the places where this will be deployed, land is cheap. The Microsoft document you point to isn't very clear on th

      • I think saving money on cooling is the primary motivation behind the project, with security an additional consideration. From the Microsoft page that you linked:

        In fact, Naval Group adapted a heat-exchange process commonly used for cooling submarines to the underwater datacenter. The system pipes seawater directly through the radiators on the back of each of the 12 server racks and back out into the ocean. Findings from phase 1 of Project Natick indicate water from the datacenter rapidly mixes and dissipates in the surrounding currents.

        From the IEEE Spectrum article about Project Natick [ieee.org] that Microsoft links to:

        When Sean James, who works on data-center technology for Microsoft, suggested that the company put server farms entirely underwater, his colleagues were a bit dubious. But for James, who had earlier served on board a submarine for the U.S. Navy, submerging whole data centers beneath the waves made perfect sense.

        This tactic, he argued, would not only limit the cost of cooling the machines—an enormous expense for many data-center operators—but it could also reduce construction costs, make it easier to power these facilities with renewable energy, and even improve their performance.

        How about security? Is your data safe from cyber or physical theft if it’s underwater? Absolutely. A Natick site would provide the same encryption and other security guarantees of a land-based Microsoft data center. While no people would be physically present, sensors would give a Natick pod an excellent awareness of its surroundings, including the presence of any unexpected visitors.

    • Why not build data centers into the bases of offshore wind turbines.

      Because wind turbines are regularly struck by lightning.

      • Huh? So? That's a very minor engineering problem compared to most of the other issues.

        • Huh? So? That's a very minor engineering problem compared to most of the other issues.

          It really isn't. What happens when 1.21 GW passes through your server while the HDD spins up past 8,800 RPM?

          • The minor engineering problem prevents the 1.21GW passing through your server. Seriously this is especially trivial to do in this scenario with easy energy dissipation, easy shielding, local earth reference due to local generation, and isolation of external connections (unless you don't chose to connect via fibre because you don't like bandwidth in your datacentre).

            This is literally one of the best cases for lightning protection. It is far worse putting a datacentre in a building on land.

    • That is too European of an idea for a US company.
  • This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.
    • by Vreejack ( 68778 )

      It's not going to hurt, either. The amount of heat generated by all the world's servers would be undetectable in the ocean.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Back of envelope calculation gives me (assuming global data centre usage remains constant) an ocean temp rise of 2.62e-7 Kelvin/year. Not significant.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        It's not going to hurt, either. The amount of heat generated by all the world's servers would be undetectable in the ocean.

        While you'd never really need to worry about heating the ocean, creating a warm spot (or even a convenient surface) in the ocean might cause new problems ... because the things which live in the ocean will be attracted to it as a place to live.

        Your submerged data centre will become an artificial reef pretty quickly.

        What are you doing today, Bob?

        Oh, you know, it's Wednesday, so I have t

      • I wondered about this. If the heat were spread throughout the ocean, it would be a negligible impact, but raising the temperature in a bay by one degree can have quite significant ecological impacts. It depends a lot on how much tidal flow there is and how much heat the thing is dissipating.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.

      Against the vastness of the ocean; underwater data centers are going to make no statistical difference to the temperature of the ocean.
      Even if temperatures in the environment raise by the forecasted 2C- that's not going to drastically impact the cooling ability of the ocean either.

      Of course, it would be even better if the data center was in low orbit.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Actually the vacuum of space is an insulator, it's quite difficult to cool stuff in orbit. More precisely, the minimum achievable temperature is much lower, but the speed to achieve it is also slower.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Yup, to explain what he means better:

          There are three types of heat transfer in most of everyday life; conductive (air blowing across something or another object touching, pulling the heat away), convective (heat rises due to decreased density), and radiant (IR radiation, heat lamps, the heat you feel at a distance from a camp fire). Without an atmosphere around a spaceship you loose two of the three types and must depend on IR radiation alone. Underwater you still get conductive and convective, and conducti

      • by Anonymous Coward

        The data centers would be *harder* to cool in low orbit, so that wouldn't make sense for the data-center builders, minus the abundant solar energy.

      • by dj245 ( 732906 )

        This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.

        Against the vastness of the ocean; underwater data centers are going to make no statistical difference to the temperature of the ocean. Even if temperatures in the environment raise by the forecasted 2C- that's not going to drastically impact the cooling ability of the ocean either.

        Of course, it would be even better if the data center was in low orbit.

        A bigger point is that that heat would eventually be dispersed across the world anyway.

        Current best environmental practice is to use air cooled heat exchangers, since everything else has been restricted. That is what power stations and datacenters are mostly doing these days.

        It is more efficient to simply use seawater or river water at land installations as a heatsink to dump the AC rejected heat into. This was widely used in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, national/local environmental agen

        • by Memnos ( 937795 )

          Ultimately any energy savings to be had by sinking datacenters probably isn't worth the added infrastructure cost. Adding "marine" to anything tends to make the cost 3x what it would otherwise.

          They could offset the extra cost with extra "value" - instead of just adding "marine" they could add "marine blockchain".

    • Alright, I need help here. Sarcasm or not?

    • by godrik ( 1287354 )

      This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.

      Well. It is that, or run a bunch of AC systems to cool the machines down. This solutions saves about half the energy, so I say, it is still a win. (Albeit not the perfect solution.)

    • This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.

      Even worse, what if they build one of these near R'lyeh ? He might wake up from the warmth.

    • The warming effect of these "immersion heaters" on the oceans is insignificant even if all datacenters in the world were already sunk in the ocean. Every second of every day, the Earth is hit by 1.74 x 10^17 watts of energy from the sun. So even 100 gigawatts of "immersion heaters" in the ocean would be less than 0.001% of the heating effect that the oceans already get from solar radiation.

      The real benefit is that 15-20% reduction in electricity use for cooling, especially if that's 15-20% less fossil fue

    • by cyn1c77 ( 928549 )

      This is clearly not a long term solution, the oceans are warming and that is already causing concerns. Sticking a bunch of immersion heaters in the ocean is not exactly going to help.

      You're totally right! We should put them in the arctic and antarctic instead! It's colder there!

  • I hope it takes more than just some scuba gear to get physical access to this data center.
    • I hope it takes more than just some scuba gear to get physical access to this data center.

      Don't worry, the Russian have already tapped the data line leading to the data center. They can give us a backup if someone sabotages the data center.

  • ...instead of stealing just the data, hackers will steal the whole data center ?
  • Repairs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @12:54PM (#56737478) Homepage

    Servers in data centers now are hardly ever repaired. Why spend the money? When you're running 10,000 servers and 1 breaks? What is the cost of that single unit vs the time to troubleshoot and solve the issue? All of the software and data is designed to be redundant anyways nowadays. The data will just be shifted around, and the processing load shifted as well. So having no access to fix things is mostly a moot issue. And 5 years? Thats about the max length of a server in a data center as it stands right now as it is. Overall, this sounds like a good scenario!

    • Re:Repairs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @01:25PM (#56737702)

      Servers in data centers now are hardly ever repaired. Why spend the money? When you're running 10,000 servers and 1 breaks? What is the cost of that single unit vs the time to troubleshoot and solve the issue?

      Do you have any idea how cheap it is to hire a warm body, even if they got the super duper awesome A+ certification, to maintain thousands and thousands of servers? At a university, we pay ours $11/hour for less than ten hours per week to service a thousand servers. He pays for himself many times over every week compared to letting even a single server go unrepaired.

      Let's say you can't get labor that cheap and your version of cheap labor costs $30/hour with benefits (keeping in mind that this is just slightly more than a menial job to diagnose and replace DIMMs, motherboards, hard drives, etc so $30 is too much IMO). For 1000 servers you probably need much less than ten hours in a typical environment, but let's round up to ten. That's $300/week. If he fixes just one $5000 server per week, he has paid for himself even if he's on Facebook during times when nothing is broken. We are an HPC center and stress these servers to the max, so we do have multiple parts failures in a typical week.

      What morons just let servers die and throw them away when all you need is a replacement DIMM? I realize that some people are stupid or just haven't done that math but wow, that sounds idiotic to just throw away servers when it's *much* cheaper to fix them. (And yes, I realize that having to dive down to the data center wouldn't be a cheap or viable solution, so my math doesn't apply in the case described by this article).

      • by Asgard ( 60200 )

        How many more machines could you fit in a given space if you didn't have to handle a human gaining non-disruptive access to a particular machine? At scale people start looking at a rack as the unit-of-replacement, maybe even a row. In this scenario the entire sinkable unit becomes the unit of failure.

        This isn't particularly new, Sun had Project BlackBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] in 2008.

        • When you pull out the bad rack/row and replace it with a new one, do you throw it straight into the dumpster? Or, do you pay OP's $30/hr warm body to repair it so that it can be slotted in as the replacement for the next rack/row that fails?

          "Rack as the unit-of-replacement" necessarily implies that you're just throwing away the hardware after it's replaced. That only makes sense if abandoning repairability gives some other desirable trait (lower initial cost, better performance, lower cost of operation, sm

      • In my experience, a DC doesn't need that much once it is up and running. You need facilities people (HVAC, power, security, etc.), but that is for any building. For the servers themselves, you really just need a couple operators, at worst maybe on a 24 hour shift, but even 9-5 would be just fine.

        With components like HDDs being replaced by SSDs that have a significantly larger MTBF, it really doesn't take that many people to man a DC.

        • by Cederic ( 9623 )

          None at all for this one.

          It's about as dark site as you'll get. Run until it's broken, then recycle the whole data centre.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        What morons just let servers die and throw them away when all you need is a replacement DIMM? I realize that some people are stupid or just haven't done that math but wow, that sounds idiotic to just throw away servers when it's *much* cheaper to fix them.

        That DIMM and its motherboard are both going to be replaced soon anyway, by hardware that is more efficient (that is, makes better use of the existing power and cooling infrastructure). So, the repaired server is not worth as much as a new server.

        There is also a cost in maintaining an inventory of replacement parts.

        I know some laptops have dispensed with DIMMs in favor of RAM soldered to the motherboard, I'm sure someone has done the math as to whether that makes sense for datacenter servers.

      • I realize that some people are stupid or just haven't done that math but wow, that sounds idiotic to just throw away servers when it's *much* cheaper to fix them.
        Plenty of big data centers do that.
        Google uses to have cargo containers fitted out with racks of computers, drives and UPSs.
        They placed them somewhere and let them run, they never repaired anything, when the whole container dropped below 50% capacity they dismantled it and threw it away (because that took 3 or 4 years and the then actual tech was

      • The fact you think the cost of someone to do this is only the hourly rate means you are someone that shouldn't be making these decisions as you don't understand the costs.
    • by sloth jr ( 88200 )
      One thing that can have more catastrophic problems is failure of network gear. Usually this is some of the more reliable gear in a DC, but failures certainly aren't unheard of (and trouble in cable and transceivers is a lot more common than switch gear failure - though usually the failure footprint is a lot smaller). Though every DC work its salt will have redundant network paths, that still might mean you'd be running without redundancy for the duration of the installation. That will definitely be a proble
      • by mysidia ( 191772 )

        trouble in cable and transceivers is a lot more common than switch gear failure

        When each cable enters the datacenter --- you could have a "redundancy pigtail" spliced onto each incoming fibre lead that connects each strand of fibre to three or four active MUX units (or DWDM modules) that allow for several different connections using different light frequency ranges.

        Connect the servers to a switching matrix that users MUX units as well to mate the optical connections between servers and switche

  • If eliminating oxygen and water from the air are so important, it would be fairly easy to seal a server behind a sheet of vinyl and purge the air inside with nitrogen. Or just fill the system with dry air if Nitrogen bothers you. The problem now is that the server exchanges air with the larger room, where people are breathing. There is no reason that professionally maintained servers need to be exposed to atmosphere outside of occasional maintenance.

    • If the server is sunk into the ocean, never to be used again, then it doesn't hurt to purge the air for nitrogen. This stops any corrosion from happening, makes fires impossible, keeps a lot of bacteria types from growing, and lots of other good things.

      There are music studios which fill the mixing room full of nitrogen when it isn't in use, just so the contacts do not corrode.

  • by thePsychologist ( 1062886 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @01:04PM (#56737534) Journal

    There are so many lifeforms in the ocean that people rarely see, so if this sinking data center idea takes off, the massive number of sunk data centers could affect these lifeforms and no one will watch out for them.

    Yes, it might reduce the CO2 and barely warm up the sea, but there are other aspects to balancing this equation than just this.

    • the massive number of sunk data centers could affect these lifeforms

      Indeed. It may give them shelter and a home in an otherwise barren wasteland that is the typical ocean floor.

      Don't get caught in the diving marketing materials. Most of the ocean floor is about as rich in environment as the middle of the Sahara. A completely empty and barren land with nothing but sand, water, and the occasional passing crab. Conversely when humans have in the past sunk things into the ocean they have turned the area in to one teeming with life in the form of what becomes an artificial reef.

  • That's no data center - it's a Twinkie factory!

  • Apparently MS is unfamiliar with the concept of a boat. Or security.
  • by FryingLizard ( 512858 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @01:38PM (#56737820)

    Why sink it? That shit sounds expensive. The only thing you're after here is free cooling; why can't it be on the shoreline, or say 50ft offshore? Stick it in a concrete bunker if you like; run a water pump or arrange for natural sea currents to do the work. It's good enough for nuclear power stations.
    This sounds like a toy project.

    • Yep. Or an attempt to be outside the jurisdiction of any country that has data protection laws.
    • If it's going to be off-shore, it should be far enough off-shore to be in open ocean, free of territorial waters.

      Sink it far enough below the surface to minimize the effects of storms and to not affect surface navigation, attached to the sea floor by cables.

      It should not affect the wild life, and even could be made big enough to support a crew.

    • This sounds like a toy project.

      Pilot project. Feasability study. There's plenty of ways to describe such things, but "toy" is not the right one.

      Speaking of toy projects, what was your idea again? Having to purchase ocean front land, build pipework and pumps, more complicated environmental regulations to navigate with NIMBYs to boot.

      Your project just sunk itself (pun intended) unintentionally on cost benefit.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Temperature decreases with depth, down to about 1000m. They must have decided that with the density of servers and amount of heat generated that the temperature on the surface was too high to provide adequate cooling.

  • Computer equipment depreciates to zero in 2 years. If you can't upgrade the equipment, this is kind of a dead end. Better to locate near geothermal power in Iceland and air cool everything.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      The beauty of it is once it's obsolete, it's already been dumped in the sea.

    • You'll get a huge bill from the IRS for trying. 7 years for servers, 3 for desktops/laptops.

  • by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Wednesday June 06, 2018 @02:12PM (#56738040)
    I'm sure this is by no means the first data center sunk by Microsoft!
  • you better check under the sea, cause that is where you'll find me underneath the seeaaaaaaaaaalabbbbbbbb underneath the water seaaaaaaaalaaaaaaab at the bottom of, the, sea.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      >> so the layer where this thing hangs out is going to end up hotter ...with probably far-ranging consequences for marine ecology,

      Yep agreed. But if undersea volcanic activity is anything to go by, actually more life will live and thrive there.

      > This is potentially going to end up being next-level bad,

      I truly doubt that one small server box could make any real difference to ambient sea temperature more than a handful of feet away, even if it tried. If this experiment starts a trend where companies

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by JustNiz ( 692889 )

          I think you're massively overreacting and doomsaying. Also... all your arguments are based on conjecture and suppositions...
          In fact there are many natural sources of heat and cooling affecting ocean temps already much more and on a much larger scale than a few server boxes could.

    • by sloth jr ( 88200 )
      This is a research project, designed to find answers to those things you called out. In regards to power, MS acknowledges that the majority of power is being consumed by computers, but that a significant portion is dedicated to cooling issues (in a standard DC). Might as well give it a try.
    • hahaha, you know all the power consumed by human civilization, if converted to heat and dumped in the ocean, woul not make an iota of difference compared to the sun. Even the natural variation in solar output totally dwarfs the heat output of mankind. We do NOT have a mans-waste-heat-warming-the-earth problem.

      Pollutions making gases that trap a bit more SOLAR heat, pollution darkening ice and snow to trap more SOLAR heat...yes, those might be a problem.

    • by Cederic ( 9623 )

      I need to dispel 10 million BTUs. Do I:
      1 - let the sea absorb it
      2 - create 200 million BTUs in wasted frictional energy to provide the cooling needed to dispel it

      Forget the pollution, the greenhouse effects; the efficiency savings alone make this a more sensible idea.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by Cederic ( 9623 )

          My point is that your point is irrelevant because you can not cool something below ambient (let alone quickly) without suffering inefficiencies. So you will always use more energy to cool something than it will dissipate if it cools naturally.

          So the ocean may warm up but less than if it was cooling the power station used to drive aircon.

          20x? Depends how much of the power station, fuel mining, transportation, transmission infrastructure (and associated mining, transportation, manufacturing), power conversion

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • by Cederic ( 9623 )

              So to recap. You're pissed off that someone is doing something that will improve the environmental friendliness of providing data centre services because it will also be economically beneficial for them and they might make higher profit.

              I'll just highlight two reasons you're talking shit:
              1 - by suggesting this will be more profitable for them you've de facto acknowledged that it's more efficient due to the lower costs that offers
              2 - they're doing tthis in tidal waters which provides substantially more water

  • ..because we're not warming the oceans fast enough already?
  • Well-Cache ( i.e. water well, ocean depth) - hermetically sealed hi-value water storage scheme in which any breach by design self-destructs its contents that provides a Zero risk highly secure environment. ZERO risk based on the NIST Common Misuse Scoring System (NISTIR 7864)

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I guess sinking Github wasn't enough for 'em...

Neutrinos have bad breadth.

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