this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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As someone with actual experience working in datacenters, this shit needs constant maintenance and repair. You can't afford to pay for my travel expenses to reboot a server.
You can't reboot a server remotely? My vast experience having been in one collocation once made me think that surely in big datacentres each server has a remotely controllable switch on its power source, like something that comes integrated with the rack itself? Is that not a thing?
You can't remotely replace hardware.
Did I say "replace"? Oh, sorry, I meant "reboot". Must have been distracted when I typed that. Silly me.
From experience, the remote "reboot" actuators sometimes they need to be rebooted themself
There's a bunch of sealed underwater data centres and they found reliability went right up (see Project Natick). Underwater has the benefit of actually having cooling though ..
Yet Microsoft abandoned the idea because it was so fraught with commercialisation issues. Which is exactly what the experts are saying
Can't maintain, can't upgrade, can't repair, it pollutes the environment with abandoned shit and it doesn't scale
Reliability probably went up because of the extra expense put into making sure it won't immediately fail and need to be repaired
I'm not saying the space data centres are a good or even viable idea, just saying you can improve the reliability significantly if you try. The space data centre planis a non starter, there's nowhere for the heat to go.
Yes, investing in reliability will increase reliability
You can radiate the heat with a biiiig long radiator but it doesn't solve any of the other problems or improve commercial scalability
You may note that this thread is talking about data centre reliability ..
Also you can't radiate heat in space ..
The ISS has 475m^2 of ammonia filled radiators that like to disagree with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System
You can ONLY radiate heat in space..
Right, I'm sure the hard radiation will help with that as well.