Microsoft are looking at putting datacenters under the ocean, which sounds like a really good idea to cool them but I can’t help but think a couple decades from now it’s going to start causing us problems
Well it’s certainly better environmentally than using conventional air conditioning, doubt it would heat up the oceans significantly
Would it heat up the oceans: yes.
Significantly:no.
If this pans out it would be a lot better than what we are doing now.
Please post the article-date in your title!
I linked the original article, the date’s there for all to see if they want it
Would you kindly swap out the memory on that server?
No one does maintenance on the server farms. It costs more money to send someone in than to let the parts slowly die until the farm no longer is economically viable. Once that happens, you sell the whole farm to a recycler.
That sounds monumentally more wasteful.
But it is cheaper.
For microsoft at the expense of the fucking planet.
This is common practice for any large data center.
No it isn’t. What DC do you work at? We recycle hardware as much as fucking possible until its worthless and then it’s sold to anyone who wants it in the company first and then the rest is sold on ebay and craigslist.
Ahhh, so this is why you are so angry in this thread. You’re the competition. Not exactly an unbiased third party.
The container is regarded as a single unit; if a server inside the container fails the functions of that server are offloaded to another available server and it is taken out of service.
Once enough servers in a container are offline the entire unit has all computational load offloaded to another, identical container with sufficient capacity.
Then the now-offline unit is retrieved and serviced; probably a ground-up rebuild of all components.
… but I do like the idea of some dude in a wetsuit trying to replace a memory stick.
Yeah that’s totally more environmently friendly to chuck hardware to the mercy of salt water… What could go wrong there??
The salt water won’t come into contact with anything except pumps, a heat exchanger and the exterior of the container.
The servers live in a nitrogen environment, so it reduces corrosion, I doubt there would be any dirt or dust. It’s going to be an incredible sterile environment.
So how do they deal with the salty ocean water corroding everything? I mean for cooling, they have to exchange heat with it somehow. Looking at pictures of wrecks, any kind of heat exchanger would likely rust or become covered in various lifeforms rather quickly.
I would imagine they can get away with using much heavier, stronger and thicker materials as these things have zero requirement for buoyancy or portability (besides getting them there in the first place)
Not sure how they’d prevent it from being covered in algae and they even mentioned that they noticed sealife was using it as a home
I reckon it’d be a combination of using the hull itsself as a giant heat sync and the fact they can get some pretty ridiculous cooling from the ocean to compensate for some inefficiency with heat transfer
Just my guess though
Why would this be a bad thing? Doubt it happens at any scale but this seems like a perfectly viable way to cool data centers compared to how energy intensive they are today.
I imagine people are concerned about disposal and failures. They are unmaintainable ewaste containers
But without oxygen and with fewer vibrations from cooling, they last 5years longer with no maintenance.
Do you know what salt water does to literally almost any man made materials?
I’m sure the engineers who made this know. And if they didn’t, this is an article from 2018, they would have most certainly found out by now.
Which makes you wonder why there’s no update because this is something that we’ve known about for thousands of years and still need to constantly repaint boats because the ocean doesn’t give a fuck.
Maybe they’re able to use different materials? After all boats need to float so maybe they need to use lighter, less durable materials and have thinner walls
These things could be made as dense and thick as needed because they explicitly need not to float
