Microsoft’s undersea data center rises from the seabed with grim success

Microsoft’s underwater data center in the Northern Islands rises from the top againm depth of the ocean, company announced on mondayand it is remarkably intact, apart from being covered in sea foam.

The data center that Microsoft has sunk under 117 feet of water from the coast Orkney Islands of Scotland in 2018 – it looks like a large sealed fuel tank. After two years on the seabed, it is now covered in algae, shells and melon-sized anemones. But Microsoft special projects specialist Spencer Fowers said in a statement that the company was “very impressed” by the lack of “sustainable growth in the marine environment.”

Inside, 864 servers with a combined storage and cooling infrastructure of 27.6 petabytes passed the test. in an inert gas atmosphere – Microsoft noted that conditions European Marine Energy Center the test site may include tidal currents at nine miles per hour and 60ft waves during storms… In fact, Microsoft has said the hardware performs better than ground systems. Project Natick leader Ben Cutler said on his blog that the outage rate in the Northern Islands is only one-eighth of what you would expect from a traditional data center, and that it performs “very well” in the region’s power grid, which is 100% wind and solar.

This confirms the hypothesis about the sea.floor preferred for server farms or topside environments where the gear can be damaged due to corrosion due to oxygen and humidity, constant temperature fluctuations and physical movement during maintenance. Placing data centers underwater can also provide a closer location to customers and will obviously make cooling much easier., and Microsoft previously suggested that they might be powered by tidal generators… The devices are also portable and easily scalable to larger operations…

One obvious problem is that on-site repair is not possible, although Microsoft wrote in a blog post that servers in out-of-service datacenters are already being replaced twice in a decade. Company hopes that increasing the reliability of submarine servers means “the few that fail before are simply disconnected. “

IN Verdict announced the potential environmental impact of subsea data centers is unclear in 2018; one unit can be neglectedigiimpact on local temperatures, but their mass can have a noticeable effect on marine life…

“While there can be significant benefits for companies like Microsoft when moving storage overseas, the impact of any design placed in a marine environment will need to be studied, especially one that generates significant amounts of local heat.” said a marine ecologist from the University of Portsmouth. Gordon Watson reported the Verdict. Watson added that any site would need to be assessed for its environmental impact and that “I amIt is not as easy (at least in countries with advanced maritime planning legislation) as simply sticking something on the seabed and returning it after five years. “

There is also the problem of diminishing returns. Leeds Beckett University Colin Pattinson, Dean of the School of Computing, Creative Technology and Engineering said to Wired in 2018, while subsea data centers are “worth a try,” the efficiency gains from lower power requirements have diminished over time.

“In fact, what we’re trying to do now is squeeze even more savings out of the same underlying technology,” Pattinson told Wired.… “We could have slowed down our growth, but there will still be an increase in the energy demand that data centers create due to the amount of data we produce.”

The next phase of Natick will demonstrate simplicity disposal and recycling…

“We are now trying to use what we did instead of feeling the need to go and prove something else,” Cutler said in a statement.… “We did what we had to do. Natick is a key building block for the company, if appropriate. “