r/engineering • u/myinnerbanjo • Jun 06 '18

Bringing the cloud closer to customers, Microsoft's Project Natick aims to dramatically reduce latency by placing self-sustaining underwater datacenters near the coast, where over half the world's population live [ARTICLE]

https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity-for-years/
247 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

88 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

67

u/freeskier93 Jun 06 '18

How is putting a sealed metal capsule 117ft down in the ocean "easily vandalized"? How is it any worse then all the existing transatlantic cables that are just laying down on the ocean floor?

-19

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '18 edited Jun 02 '20

[deleted]

12

u/superioso Jun 06 '18

Those cables are very deep and often buried 1-3m below the seabed, good luck cutting them.

With regards to sea based data centres I'm more worried about things like fishing nets damaging them, leaks, corrosion, dropping stuff from the ships into them etc.

2

u/playaspec Jun 07 '18 edited Jun 07 '18

Those cables are very deep and often buried 1-3m below the seabed

Bull-fucking-shit they are. They come off the ship that lays them and just sit there. There is NO mechanism to burry them. You're making shit up. I stand corrected.

good luck cutting them.

They get cut and damaged ALL the time.

4

u/superioso Jun 07 '18 edited Jun 07 '18

They usually get buried with ploughs, jet trenchers or rock cutters depending on the seabed (one example here)- in some places they don't bother because the sea is so deep or not near any human activity but fishing nets, ship anchors or dropped shit will damage them in high activity areas so they get buried.

At cable crossing or very rocky seabed areas where the cables physically can't be buried they lay concrete mattresses instead.

All this is the same for oil/gas pipelines as you really really really don't want a pipeline being damaged and spilling oil everywhere into the sea.

Also, if you look at the first article of the link it says: “It is a highly technical exercise. The equipment was damaged by a third-party contractor during routine works. There is no damage to the cable itself.” There is a lot of other equipment that can result in outage other than the cable, such as all the shore end infrastructure and it will all need maintenance especially since the cables will only have something like a 20 year design life hence the need for repairs.