Microsoft Testing Underwater Data Centers

We’ve heard of underwater cities (Atlantis), underwater caves, underwater tunnels, and other types of underwater activities. However, Microsoft is taking it one step further by experimenting with underwater data centers. Data centers, as you must know, are built (traditionally on land) for the sole purpose of storing data to be accessible from the cloud.

Microsoft revealed Project Natick, an initiative that deploys data centers at the very depths of the ocean after completing a 3 month-long experiment with underwater data centers in which a steel cylinder (with the power equivalent of 300 personal computers) was placed into the ocean just near the coast of California. In fact, the results of the experiment were so good that Microsoft had operated the data center 75 days longer than originally planned.

Seems wacky? Not really. The servers in a data center produce a lot of heat, and cooling them takes up valuable resources and money. In fact, Facebook’s first and only datacenter outside the U.S. is located in Luleå, Sweden. Luleå is very close to the Artic North Pole, with temperatures dropping to -20^oC in winters. Natural cool air from the surroundings is utilized to cool the servers. The data center opened in 2013 in an area known as the Node Pole.

Land-based data centers take more than 2 years to build, and are a hassle to cool and power. Plus, they are very far from actual populations, leaving behind a latency in data access by users. Underwater datacenters can reduce the cost of cooling data centers, as the ocean floor is colder when compared to land. Electricity is harnessed from ocean currents present around the data centers to power the data center. Also, latency can be eliminated as the datacenters can be placed near users (since, according to Microsoft, half of the world lives within 200kms of the ocean).

The first prototype vessel, the Leona Philpot (named after a character in the Halo game), is 10x7 ft and contained a single computing rack placed in a nitrogen-pressurized environment. Engineers monitored vital stats like motion, pressure and humidity.

"This is speculative technology, in the sense that if it turns out to be a good idea, it will instantly change the economics of this business. There are lots of moving parts, lots of planning that goes into this. This is more a tool that we can make available to data center partners. In a difficult situation, they could turn to this and use it,” said Norm Whitaker, Head of Special Projects, Microsoft Research NExT.

Microsoft says the next vessel could be up to 3 times bigger than the Leona Philpot, and have more than 20 times the computing power.

For more exciting tech news, go to http://q3tech.blogspot.com