Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

How leaks could destroy your data

When we think of the words "leak" and "data" used together in a sentence, we usually assume that someone's security has failed and sensitive information has been accessed by those who ought not have access.

Well if Microsoft's latest plan works out, leaks and data could have a whole new relationship.

That's because the company is experimenting with locating the computers which power its datacentres underwater. What the?

One of the biggest problems facing any large computer or collection of computers is that of heat. All electronics create heat and the more electronics you have, the more heat you create.

The cost of getting rid of that heat can be a significant percentage of the total cost of running such a datacentre and Microsoft thinks it has come up with a cunning way to reduce that cost.

Water, as most Aardvark readers will already know, has a very high specific heat. This means it takes quite a bit of energy to raise a given amount of water by a given temperature.

Compared to air, water is a great cooling medium. Air's specific heat is lousy -- just a quarter that of water on a per unit of mass basis and, once you factor in the very, very low mass of air at normal atmospheric pressure, the cooling effectiveness of water jumps to four thousand times that of air.

It just makes sense therefore, that dunking your datacentre in water has massive potential to slash the cost of keeping it cool.

What's more, as a benefit of its huge specific heat, large masses of water tend not to vary in temperature much over the course of a year. This means that a water-based cooling system doesn't have to be designed to cope with the wild variations in temperature often encountered in the air that surrounds us as we go from winter to summer and back again.

However, I still have to wonder at Microsoft's strategy here.

Most news organisations are running pretty much the same story with the same pictures that show a large steel cylinder that was operated in the sea off the California coast for several months last year.

The engineer in me asks "why submerge the whole damned thing?"

Surely it would be far more practical and sensible to simply locate your data-centre on dry ground along the shore and then run plumbing out into the sea so as to source and return your cooling water.

The job of servicing and maintaining an underwater data centre would be an order of magnitude greater than that of a dry-ground based one and the effects of seawater leaking into a bunch of electronics located beneath the ocean waves doesn't bear thinking about.

There are many pros and cons to the underwater datacentre concept...

On the pro side of the ledger I suspect that ground leases for seabed are much lower than those for prime coastal land. Then there's the potential to extract some of your electricity from wind and wave energy.

On the con side there are the risks of those leaks and the difficulties associated with service and maintenance.

Will Microsoft go ahead with these underwater datacentres or will the idea sink, never to be heard of again?

Well I'm thinking that the better option might be to have your datacentre on a platform (a bit like an oil rig) so that you get the benefits of not needing to buy expensive coastal land as well as abundant wave-energy and coolant, whilst still allowing everything to be kept dry and easy to work on. With the falling price of oil, I'm pretty sure that it would be easy to find a few "surplus" oil rigs that could be repurposed to become sea-based datacentre platforms and relocated to where the need is greatest.

Here in NZ, perhaps we should look at locating our datacentres near hydro schemes. This would give us plenty of icy river water for cooling and an abundant supply of clean, green electricity.

Hmmm... come to think of it... won't there be quite a few gigawatts of power going very cheap when a certain aluminium smelter down in the South Island is decommissioned in the not-too-distant future?

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say in the Aardvark Forums.

PERMALINK to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font