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Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

bbc.com

11–20 of 397 posts

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#11

2016 article... but still cool! *edit, no its not, I have too many tabs open and mixed it up with the blog post listed in the comments. ignore me

I think you may be thinking of something else. This was posted today, an hour ago, on the BBC.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#12
> Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, which is a significant problem in data centres

First time I hear corrosion is a problem in datacentres. I never noticed any corrosion on any machine at home or work. Does it have to do with the cooling of datacentres?

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#13

Interesting idea but the maintenance must be painful. Let's say a hard disk fails, what do you do?

It's a fail-in-place data center. If a hard disk fails, you don't do anything. They used to replace telephony equipment all the time too, now it's just a locked room in a building. This is pushing data centers to be more hands-off.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#14

Is there a benefit over just putting it in a boat/coastal building and using water (perhaps pumped from some depth) for cooling?

The closest thing I remember is Google taking over an old paper mill in Finland that used a condenser sunk into a canal connected to the Baltic sea.

https://www.wired.com/2012/01/google-finland/ there should be a video with the details here.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#17

2016 article... but still cool! *edit, no its not, I have too many tabs open and mixed it up with the blog post listed in the comments. ignore me

I think you may be thinking of something else. This was posted today, an hour ago, on the BBC.

Im pretty sure I heard about this a couple of years ago too

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#20
post #12

> Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, which is a significant problem in data centres First time I hear corrosion is a problem in datacentres. I never noticed any corrosion on any machine at home or work. Does it have to do with the cooling of datacentres?

I wondered about this as well : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michael_Schappert/publi...

Seems like its a combination of cooling data centres (flowing air) and the quality of the air being circulated. So if there are pollutants in the air they pose a danger to the circuitry.

Never occurred to me this was yet another thing to be wary of when running a data centre!

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