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REDMOND, Wash. – Going for a page from Jules Verne, researchers at Microsoft believe the future of data centres might be underneath the sea.
Microsoft has tested a prototype of the self-contained data centre that can operate hundreds of feet underneath the top of the ocean, eliminating among the technology industry’s priciest problems: the air conditioning bill.
Today’s data centres, which power everything from streaming video to social networking and email, contain a large number of computer servers generating lots of heat. When there is too much heat, the servers crash.
Putting the gear 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 machine either having a turbine or 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 beneath 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 can you do this?’ ” said Ben Cutler, a Microsoft computer designer who’s among the engineers who done the work Natick system. “But while you think much more about it, it actually makes a large amount of sense.”
Such a radical idea could run into hurdles, 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 assumes land to simply 90 days, offering a huge cost advantage.
The underwater server containers could also help make Web services speed up. Much of the world’s population now resides in urban centres close to oceans but a long way away from data centres usually built-in out-of-the-way places with lots of room. The opportunity to place computing power near users lowers the delay, or latency, people experience, which is a major problem for web users.
The New York Times News Service
