Tag: data centers
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Watt Lies Beneath Part 2: Power was the assumption. Proof Is the price of admission
Watt Lies Beneath, Part 2: an ongoing series examining the evolving infrastructure, regulatory, and power constraints shaping the global data centre industry by Matthias Haymoz, Executive Director, SDEA. Whatever drew data centres to their sites – fibre, taxes, talent, hydro, cool air – every version of the map rested on one unexamined assumption: the grid…
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Avoiding another standpipe summer: how to shift to a more water‑wise Britain
Steve Harding, founder and CEO of climate tech Showerkap, explores how we can shift to a more water-wise Britain, ahead of World Water Week next week. Even though it’s decades ago, I can still remember my neighbours queuing for water in the street during the extreme water shortage of 1976. And as the UK experiences…
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Watt Lies Beneath series, Part 1: The efficiency you were sold was measured on a mild day
Watt Lies Beneath, Part 1: a series of articles by Matthias Haymoz, Executive Director, SDEA. Data centre efficiency figures are quoted like fixed properties of a building. They aren’t. PUE moves with the weather, the load, and the age of the infrastructure – and the number in the brochure was almost always recorded under the…
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Five myths about underwater data centres, from someone who builds them
An article by Hannah Hawthorne-Briscoe, Chief Operating Officer at SubSea Cloud, around the five myths of underwater data centres. In the summer of 2020, a crane on a barge off the Orkney coast lifted a white steel cylinder the length of a shipping container out of the North Sea, and everyone present stopped to look at it. It had gone down two years earlier, clean and bare. It came up wearing the sea. Algae, barnacles and sea anemones covered the hull so thickly that the engineers had to hose it down before they could read the markings. Inside, sealed away from all of it in dry nitrogen, sat hundreds of ordinary servers, the same machines you would find in any data centre in Slough or Ashburn, and the reason the barge was there at all was to find out how many of them had died. The exercise had a control group. Microsoft had run identical servers, from the same batch, in a conventional facility on land, where technicians could walk between the racks and check on them daily. The underwater machines had been unreachable for two years. No engineer had laid a hand on them. If anything had gone wrong, nothing could have been done about it. The underwater servers failed at roughly…