Two years on, and Microsoft’s underwater server experiment resurfaces! Success?
Back in 2018, Microsoft sunk an entire data center to the bottom of the Scottish sea, plunging 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage 117 feet deep in the ocean.
Earlier this month, they reported that its latest experiment was a success, revealing results that show that the idea of an underwater data center is actually might work.
It might seem a strange idea throwing an entire data center to the bottom of the ocean, but Microsoft’s Project Natick team figured that this would result in more reliable and energy efficient data centers in the future.
Data centers run into issues like corrosion from oxygen and humidity and controlling shifts in temperatures when they are placed on land. But in a water-tight environment with tight temperature control, far fewer issues pop up. The idea is that these kinds of servers can be easily deployed in sizes big and small near the coasts of areas that need them.
The benefits are huge. Microsoft says thetested underwater data center had just 1/8th the failure rate of a regular land based data center. That lower failure rate is important, given that it’s much harder to service a broken server when it’s in an airtight container at the bottom of the ocean.
