Re:Project Natick: Microsoft's Underwater Data Center
by cm2187 on Monday February 01, 2016 @02:20AM
(#11010321)
Sharks love to chew oceanic cables!
If you need to fix something while the datacentre is in the middle of the ocean, the cost and time will be a multiple vs if it just off the coast.
Re:Project Natick: Microsoft's Underwater Data Center
by dogma1138 on Monday February 01, 2016 @02:50AM
(#11010408)
That's true for copper cables not so much for fiber optics ;)
Re:Project Natick: Microsoft's Underwater Data Center
by rgbrenner on Monday February 01, 2016 @02:57AM
(#11010433)
I think you have the backwards -- sharks aren't attracted to copper cables.. but are attracted to undersea fiber optic cables.. because they carry high voltage power (for the undersea repeaters), which emits an electromagnetic field that attracts the sharks:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/08/15/sharks-...
Re:Project Natick: Microsoft's Underwater Data Center
by dogma1138 on Monday February 01, 2016 @03:09AM
(#11010462)
I stand corrected, forgot about the power cables I know sharks were attracted to the EM field around the old transatlantic phone and telegraph wires. Well at least it will be a good reason for an outage.
Plus, at depth, storms and typhoons don't affect things all that much, it's rather calm. So, the main threat might be from saboteurs rather than natural disasters [beside the salty environment] because beside a coast guard at the surface [which if contraband coming in is any proxy, it's pretty porous], you don't have a "police presence". So they'd have to rely heavily on monitoring systems.