In 2018, Microsoft sank an entire data to the bottom of Scotland, 864 servers with 27.6 petabytes, 117 feet below the ocean. Today, the company reported that its latest experiment was a success, revealing findings that show that the idea of an underwater data center is actually quite good.
Placing an entire data center on the ocean floor may seem strange to most, but Project Natick hypothesized that this experiment would result in more reliable and energy-efficient data centers.
On land, data centers face issues like corrosion from oxygen and moisture, and controlling temperature changes. But in a watertight environment with strict temperature control, fewer problems arise . The idea is that these types of servers can be easily deployed in small and large sizes near the coasts of the regions that need them, providing better local access to cloud- based resources in more places.
Microsoft says the underwater data center had just one-eighth the failure rate of a land-based data center , a dramatic improvement , The Verge reports . That lower failure rate is quite significant, considering it's much harder to service a damaged server when it's in an airtight container on the ocean floor.
The company has been exploring the idea of underwater servers for some time, and in 2015, it put a data center off the coast of California for several months as a proof of concept to see if the computers would even survive the journey.
This round of testing was for a much longer period of time, with the goal of proving that Microsoft could successfully this project on a practical scale so that it could be built and produced for real use.
The next step for the Project Natick team is to show that the servers can be easily removed and recycled once they reach the end of their life.
