Data Center

Many large company data center is located on the  European Marine Energy Center , a test site for tidal and wave technologies . On the Orkney Islands, wind turbines and solar panels feed the 10,000 inhabitants to 100%. The data center will also be powered solely by renewable energies . Companies says it consumes a little less than a quarter megawatt when it runs at full load.

This data center is intended to operate for five years without maintenance .The US giant explains that it wants to determine the economic viability of such a concept before considering an operational deployment.

TO KNOW MORE

Our data soon hosted at the bottom of the seas?

The gigabytes of data that pass every second on the Internet pass through data centers, where thousands of servers consume as much power to operate as to cool down. Therefore, the idea of ​​diving these facilities into the water and feed them through the sea currents is perhaps not so surprising. Companies has tried the experiment and obtained promising results.

Water, which is salty, is not the first element in which we plan to dive computers .The computer giant has launched an experimental program with the project code name Natick (the name of a North American city in the state of Massachusetts) to immerse a datacenter in a sealed container. about ten meters deep. The objectives are multiple.

First of all, it is a question of efficiently cooling these installations which release a huge quantity of heat . On Earth , the problem of cooling data centers is a real headache. In 2008, Google had also planned to install servers in the ocean with, as a bonus, a recovery of wave energy using an articulated floating barge.

Plunged in cold water, the container does not need to be air conditioned. Companies says its data center also does not use water to cool down, the dissipation being done through heat exchanges. Inside, the box is pressurized with nitrogen , which transmits the heat produced by the electronic circuits. The other benefit highlighted is the speed with which data centers of this type can be put into service. Where it takes about two years to build a data center on dry land, these containers could be operational within 90 days.

In addition, near-shore dumping, close to cities, could help improve the performance of online services. Indeed, Many companies recalls that half of the population living less than 200 km from the sea, install data centers underwater could reduce the latency, that is to say, the duration of transit of the sea. information between the source and its recipient. A key factor, knowing that streaming video is now the biggest consumer of Internet traffic, not to mention the upcoming explosion of the Internet of Things that will require more computing power.

Source: Datacenter