Microsoft has dedicated years on experimentation by using an underwater data center the size of a shipping container placed on the seabed at the expense of the Orkney Islands, Scotland. The company took the “Project Natick” underwater data warehouse out of the water earlier this year (early summer) and inspected the data center and the air contained within it over the past few months to confirm the viability of the model.
The results of the experiment have not only been in the favor of data centers’ performance, however, their reliability concern too. It simply indicates that using such offshore underwater data centers proved to be efficient in terms of performance, as well as demonstrated that the servers were up to eight times more reliable than servers on land. Researchers will be investigating exactly what is causing this higher stability ratio to turn these benefits to land-based server farms to increase overall performance and efficiency.
Other advantages include the ability to operate with greater power efficiency, especially in areas where the onshore grid is considered unreliable enough for continuous operation. This is in part because subsea conditions have reduced the need for artificial cooling of servers located within the data farm. The Orkney Island region is covered by a 100% renewable grid powered by wind and solar, and the difference in availability between the two would have proven to be a challenge to the infrastructure power requirements of the same onshore data center. In the area, the grid was sufficient for underwater work of the same size.
Microsoft’s Natick experiment has effectively shown that portable and flexible data center deployments in coastal regions around the globe is the most optimal way to serve the data center requirements while also keeping energy and operating costs truncated. This all could be done while setting the trends of smaller data centers closer to the customers’ needs. So far, the project has shown very promising outcomes. Next, it is supposed to show will how companies can expand the size and performance of these data centers by linking two or more data centers to combine their functionality.
