Finishing | Zheng Liyuan
Listing | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
Head picture | CSDN downloaded from Oriental IC
Recently, Microsoft retrieved the data center that sank into the seabed two years ago from the seabed. Researchers evaluated it, and the first conclusion reached is that the server failure rate of underwater data center is higher than that of traditional data center. low.
It has to be said that although this storage method is peculiar, the effect is surprising. This is also reminiscent of GitHub's announcement two months ago: your code has been shipped to the North Pole for preservation.
These strange-looking storage methods may sound like a fantasy at first glance, but the final result proves that they are no jokes.
Microsoft sinks into the data center under the sea
Two years ago, Microsoft sank a data center to the bottom of the sea in an experiment on the Orkney coast. This is not an absurd move, but an innovative solution released by Microsoft-Underwater Data Center Project Natick, led by Ben Cutler.
Project Natick is mainly used to solve the problem of excessive heat dissipation in data centers. Project Natick plans to use the ocean, which accounts for 71% of the world's surface area, to experimentally place data centers in the ocean to evaluate the impact on the environment and analyze whether it is economically feasible from a long-term perspective. Project Natick is not only to study whether short-term use of small underwater data center clusters may be a business proposition, but also to learn from the broader experience and lessons of cloud computing energy efficiency.
Ben Cutler said that it will take about 5 years to make a complete evaluation of the Project Natick program. Regarding the subsea environmental factors that are vital to Project Natick, Ben Cutler said that the data center is actually safer than expected to be placed in the sea. Project Natick's equipment can withstand 4 meters per second ocean currents, which is quite resistant. The machinery and equipment are placed in the sea, and the shell part has the ability to resist corrosion and prevent water leakage. If the water leaks unfortunately, the impact on the environment has also been minimized. All terrestrial data centers should pay attention to, Project Natick will follow the rules. As for the public's most worrying environmental issue, Microsoft also responded: During the test, marine life quickly adapted to the existence of underwater data centers.
At present, this data center has been salvaged from the bottom of the sea, and Microsoft researchers are evaluating its performance. Their first conclusion is that this cylinder full of servers has a lower failure rate than traditional data centers, with only 8 of the 855 servers failing.
Ben Cutler said: "Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we are on land." The researchers speculated that this may be related to the absence of human interference in the data center and the lack of a large amount of oxygen.
An underwater data center may sound like an incredible idea, but David Rose, who has been a consultant in the data center industry for many years, said that this project has great potential. He said, “You can effectively move something to a safer location without having to bear the huge infrastructure costs of building a building. It is flexible and cost-effective.”
At present, Ben Cutler said that the underwater data center has passed the stage of scientific experimentation, but there is still a question worth pondering: Is it to design a large underwater data center or a small underwater data center?
In addition, Microsoft said that it will be cautious about when the underwater data center can be commercialized and is confident that it will prove the ultimate value of this idea.
Microsoft not only brought the Project Natick program, its GitHub also took unusual ways of storing code.
GitHub code has been packaged and shipped to the North Pole
GitHub released a set of photos two months ago, showing that as long as the open source code contributed before February 2nd, it has now been buried under the ice and snow in the Arctic and preserved for a thousand years.
Once the news was released, it attracted a lot of heated discussion in the technology circle.
As early as November last year, GitHub announced this exciting Arctic Code Vault (Arctic Code Vault) project at the Universe 2019 conference: leaving open source code as the fire of human civilization in the background, placing it in an environment that is stable and far away from humans. The place of war, the specific storage location is in a cellar on an island in the Arctic Circle.
On February 2 this year, GitHub performed a snapshot archive of all open source projects on the website. It is expected that team members will personally escort this batch of code to the North Pole. However, I never expected that the outbreak of the new crown epidemic would only allow the GitHub team to maintain remote contact with the partner, which is the film data storage company Piql.
The GitHub team first handed over 21TB of code data to Piql's factory in Drammen, Norway. The code is written in 186 boxes of film. Each frame of the film contains 8.8 million pixels. The source code is stored in the form of a QR code. The 186 boxes of film were then transported to Oslo, the capital of Norway, and loaded on a plane to Svalbard, 1,000 kilometers north of the European continent. In the end, the code landed in Longyearbyen, a small town with only a few thousand people on Svalbard.
There is an abandoned coal mine on the local mountain. Even if climate change is taken into account, in the foreseeable future, only the outermost few meters of permafrost will be affected. Therefore, this mine has become an important base for preserving human civilization. . Not only the famous global seed bank is here, many international organizations also store important items here. Similarly, the GitHub code is also placed here, and it is expected to be preserved for more than 1,000 years.
According to official GitHub statistics, millions of programs have contributed to the Arctic Code Vault (Arctic Code Vault) project.
In order to recognize these programmers, GitHub also designed a badge of honor. Just hover the mouse over the introduction section of the developer homepage, and you can see which projects have been placed in the North Pole.
But storing code on film is not the only method GitHub will use. Since its acquisition by Microsoft, GitHub has also participated in Microsoft's Project Silica project.
Project Silica uses laser-etched quartz glass to store data. Quartz glass is a durable storage medium that is resistant to electromagnetic interference, water, and heat, and can store data for tens of thousands of years. GitHub said that quartz glass is an ideal storage medium to permanently retain the world's open source software for future generations, so this technology is used as a new means of code preservation.
At present, GitHub has archived 6000 of the world's most popular open source repositories in the glass. When the technology matures and the cost drops, more code should be written into the glass.
Looking forward to more peculiar data storage methods
Whether it's Microsoft's underwater data center or GitHub's code buried in the North Pole, we hope that more of these seemingly absurd and effective data storage methods will appear. After all, with the rapid development of society nowadays, digitization is an inevitable trend. More and more data means larger and larger loads. Only when more stable and long-term storage methods appear, can the maintenance and retention of data be better. A good solution is also an important step for the inheritance of human civilization in the future.
reference:
After two years of subsea operation, Microsoft's underwater data center was taken out
Microsoft Crazy Research Project Natick, How the Data Center Enlargement Sea Comes True
The code in the Arctic permafrost is the ultimate romance of GitHub
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