(June 6, 2018 at 10:43 am)Mathilda Wrote: Working link here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44368813
I must say I'm intrigued.
The point is that any savings you make scale up as you get much larger data farms. If you have to pump water in to cool your computers then it won't be as efficient because it takes energy to pump the water, which also produces heat. If you have it underwater then you don't need to pump any water or air and rely on tidal power instead.
The problem is though if that a single component fails then the entire server is unusable. They're saying that in an oxygen free environment this is less likely to happen but I'm sceptical because components don't just fail for environmental reasons but because they weren't built properly in the factory. So whether it actually saves money is unknown.
I don't think this is a big problem. They're not running a single unit, like we do at home, and crossing their fingers that the thing doesn't go down while they're on holiday.
They can estimate the halflife, so to speak, of the units, and know what % of the racks will be functional after a given duration of time.
