Microsoft's new underwater data center
Microsoft deployed a data center on the seafloor off the Orkney Islands in Scotland as part of it's Project Natick. Project Natick is an initiative to identify environmentally sustainable ways of running large-scale data management units. The first phase, which kicked off in 2014, saw Microsoft build a small submersible data center that housed the equivalent of 300 desktop PCs and drop it into the ocean back in February 2016 to test whether it'd actually work.
The first phase operated for nearly four months. In phase two, which started on June 7th, Microsoft fit 864 servers on 12 racks in a sealed submersible that's about the size of a standard 40-foot-long shipping container. The container is designed to function for five years without requiring any maintenance. According to Microsoft, energy efficiency and fast data transfer was the reasoning behind Project Natick. The company notes that roughly half of the world's population lives within 120 miles of the shore, so being able to house servers near them could allow for quicker access to online services. These servers can be powered by wind mills located near the water, so you never have to worry about outages or energy costs. Also, the water in the ocean is perenially cold, and can thus take care of cooling the data centers without incurring additional costs for cooling.
The data center will be monitored for the next 12 months. Researchers at Microsoft will keep an eye on power consumption, internal humidity levels, and temperature. The company hopes that it'll eventually perfect this system of deploying data centers that are cheaper to run for years on end. This isn't the first time Microsoft has taken its infrastructure below sea level. Last September, it partnered with Facebook and Spanish telecom firm Telxius on the Marea Project to lay a 6,600 kilometer long undersea cable between the Virginia Beach in the US and Bilbao, Spain, to transmit data at a speed of up to 160 terabits per second.
Microsoft decided on the location off the coast of Scotland because it's home to the European Marine Energy Center, so the infrastructure for powering the vessel from renewable energy from on and off shore sources was already in place. Once the vessel is in the ocean, maintenance is pretty much impossible. The idea here is to accept that things will fail and can't be replaced. Then, after a few years, the plan is to retrieve the vessel, refurbish it with new machines and deploy it again.
For now, Project Natick is an applied research project, focused on determining the economic viability of operating containerized datacenters offshore near major population centers to provide cloud computing for a world increasingly dependent on internet connectivity. If the idea ever reaches commercial scale, the underwater data centers will probably be powered by whatever energy source is available locally. That said, even if they're powered by fossil fuels, the submerged data centers would likely use less energy than their onshore equivalents, thanks to the lower cooling needs under the sea. Microsoft won't share the cost of the Natick project, but believes that at commercial scale, this design will actually be cheaper than typical land-based data centers.