REDMOND, Wash. – Going for a page from Jules Verne, researchers at Microsoft believe the future of data centres might be under the sea.
Microsoft has tested a prototype of the self-contained data centre that can operate hundreds of feet underneath the surface of the ocean, eliminating among the technology industry’s most expensive problems: the environment conditioning bill.
Today’s data centres, which power everything from streaming video to social media and email, contain a large number of computer servers generating plenty of heat. When there is an excessive amount of heat, the servers crash.
Putting the apparatus under cold ocean water could fix the problem. This may also answer the exponentially growing energy demands of the computing world because Microsoft is considering pairing the system either with a turbine or perhaps a tidal energy system to create electricity.
The effort, code-named Project Natick, could trigger strands of giant steel tubes linked by fiber optic cables placed on the seafloor. Another possibility would suspend containers in the shape of jelly beans underneath the surface to capture the ocean up-to-date with turbines that generate electricity.
“When When i first heard about i thought, ‘Water … electricity, why would you do this?’ ” said Ben Cutler, a Microsoft computer designer who is one of the engineers who done the Project Natick system. “But as you think more about it, it really constitutes a large amount of sense.”
Such a radical idea could encounter stumbling blocks, including environmental concerns and unforeseen intricacies. However the Microsoft researchers think that by mass producing the capsules, they might shorten the deployment duration of new data centres in the two years it now takes on land to just 90 days, offering a huge cost advantage.
The underwater server containers could also help make Web services work faster. A lot of the earth’s population now lives in urban centres near to oceans but far away from data centres usually built-in out-of-the-way places with lots of room. The ability to place computing power near users lowers the delay, or latency, people experience, that is a major problem for web users.
The New York Times News Service
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