Underwater data centres – innovative computing solutions for stowing servers in ocean computing platforms to reduce deployment costs

Abstract

The siting of data centres comprising multiple server racks in an underwater environment is recognized to reduce cooling costs and improve datacentre performance. However, the siting of data centres in the ocean raises new deployment challenges for cloud service providers. The deployment of large sized datacentres in an underwater environment requires purchasing or hiring large sized high capacity ocean vessels that transport underwater data centres to the designated underwater location before it is dunked into the ocean. The hiring of high capacity ocean vessels with high costs is challenging for cloud service providers with small capital resources. The intended hire might not be challenging for cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft with significant capital resources. In addition, the use of high capacity ocean vessels increases the visibility of the locations of underwater data centre to other actors leveraging on the ocean’s resources for other applications. The use of small capacity ocean vessels reduces the visibility thereby enhancing the security of the underwater data centre. The research being proposed presents a computing based furling and stowing solution. The proposed solution varies the dimensions of server chassis within pre–defined minimum and maximum values. It realizes the goal by incorporating the computing framework and an enabling architecture.