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Credit, Microsoft
Microsoft’s unusual experiment has now come to an end
Two years ago, Microsoft installed a data center on the sea floor off the coast of Orkney, an archipelago in northern Scotland, in a radical experiment.
This data center is now recovered from the ocean floor, and Microsoft researchers are now evaluating how it has performed during that time and what they can learn from it about energy efficiency.
Their first conclusion is that the server lined cylinder had a lower failure rate than a conventional data center.
When the container was removed from the seabed, about 800 meters offshore, after being placed there in May 2018, only eight of the 855 servers on board failed.
This is a good index compared to a conventional data center.
“Our failure rate in the water was one-eighth what we have on land,” said Ben Cutler, who led what Microsoft calls Project Natick.
The team hypothesized that better performance may be related to the fact that there were no humans on board and that nitrogen, rather than oxygen, was being pumped into the capsule.
Credit, Microsoft
Sealed data center tube is taken from water in Orkney
“We think it has to do with this nitrogen atmosphere that reduces corrosion and is cold, and without people messing with everything,” says Cutler.
Microsoft chose Orkney for the test in part because it was a renewable energy research facility in a temperate, even slightly cold climate. The central hypothesis is that the cost of cooling computers is less when they are underwater.
The white cylinder emerged from the cold waters with a layer of algae, barnacles and anemones after a day of removal operation.
Inside, however, the data center was working fine and researchers are now examining it closely.
As more and more of our data is stored in the “cloud” today, there is growing concern about the high power consumption of data centers.
Verder
The Natick Project focused in part on finding out whether clusters of small subsea data centers for short-term use could be a business proposition, but also an attempt to learn broader lessons about energy efficiency in cloud computing.
All Orkney’s electricity comes from wind and solar power, but there was no problem keeping the subsea data center powered up.
“We were able to perform very well on a network that most terrestrial data centers consider unreliable,” said Spencer Fowers, a member of Project Natick’s technical team.
“We look forward to looking at our findings and saying that we may not need to have as much infrastructure focused on energy and reliability.”
Credit, Microsoft
Spencer Fowers inspects the servers inside the open tube
Underwater data centers may seem like a strange idea. But David Ross, who has been an industry consultant for many years, says the project has great potential.
He believes they can be an attractive option for organizations facing a natural disaster or terrorist attack: “You could move something to a safer location without incurring the huge infrastructure costs of constructing a building. It is flexible. and economic. “
Microsoft is cautious when saying when an underwater data center could be a commercial product, but is confident the idea has value.
“We think we’ve passed the point of the science experiment,” says Ben Cutler. “Now it’s simply a question of what we want to design: would it be small or large?”
The Orkney experiment is over. But the hope is that it will help find a greener way to store data both on land and underwater.
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