Is the moon too far for your data? IBM's Red Hat is teaming up with Axiom Space to send a data center into space
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That's not the issue, though. In a vacuum there is no medium with which to carry the heat away. You can't send it into the air with fans or heat sinks because there isn't any air.
At least on the moon you could sink it into the ground. But in orbit you don't have that luxury. This is a major problem that spacecraft and satellite designs need to work around, and much effort is expended in that department.
Even though space is generally considered "cold," in the absence of a medium to sink heat into the best you can do is rely on infrared radiation which is not terribly effective.
It's done for smaller parts with peltiers nowadays. Not that efficient, but there are few options. If you sink it to a large enough surface, it will radiate away.
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Ok... Data redundancy is a possible application... I will tentatively say that's a feasible goal, if still probably a stupid one.
I mean, how often do data centers upgrade storage drives? Cause the cost of doing that in space is... unreasonable.
It would depend on how critical the data is and if the cost benefit analysis breaks even or tips in favor of the moon. I would imagine housing state secrets up there would be reasonable, and documents (text files) don't take up a huge amount of space. Video would be more challenging. But realistically you could probably store all of the Secret and Top Secret documents across a few servers with maybe 5 drives in a RAID config each. Probably even a single NAS-like solution.
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The problem isn't the DNS requests. It's the data synchronization that would have to occur if you were accessing a service hosted on Earth.
There are many places on Earth where DNS servers have high latency, low bandwidth, and intermittent connectivity, yet still function fine. It’s already a solved problem.
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It would depend on how critical the data is and if the cost benefit analysis breaks even or tips in favor of the moon. I would imagine housing state secrets up there would be reasonable, and documents (text files) don't take up a huge amount of space. Video would be more challenging. But realistically you could probably store all of the Secret and Top Secret documents across a few servers with maybe 5 drives in a RAID config each. Probably even a single NAS-like solution.
I mean, yeah, you could do that.
I'm not sure if it would be better than a secret underground base... But you could do it.
With an underground base you could even have the one connection to it be a hard-line, not wireless. You could construct it with a smaller crew, easier to keep under wraps. And I expect that would still be less than 1/100th the price of building it on the moon.
Anyway, I do think the ultimate off site data storage location is a pretty entertaining idea, i'd bet it could make sense for some things, I just can't imagine what.
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It's done for smaller parts with peltiers nowadays. Not that efficient, but there are few options. If you sink it to a large enough surface, it will radiate away.
And there inlies the problem. Big surfaces are expensive to ship
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No hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, or other types of disasters on the moon. Asteroids are rare enough now that they basically don't count.
Latency is high but it doesnt matter for data redundancy.
Except radiation is much much higher around the moon, resulting in greater corruption events
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Having worked on these systems, datacenters in space still don't make any economical sense to me. Cost of shipping, additional power and thermal limitations/challenges, much greater radiation environment causing corruption and premature hardware failures, and little to no maintenance/upgrade opportunities. Zero sense
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