Back in 2018, Microsoft began Project Natick, deploying a custom-designed data center to the sea floor off the coast of Scotland. Aiming to determine whether the underwater environment would bring benefits to energy efficiency, reliability, and performance, the project was spawned during ThinkWeek in 2014, an event designed to share and explore unconventional ideas.
This week, Microsoft reported that the project had been a success. The Northern Isles data center was recently lifted from the ocean floor in a day-long operation, and teams swooped in to analyse the hardware, and the results coming out of the project are surprisingly impressive.
Smooth Sailing
Deploying and retrieving the Northern Isles data center took about a day each, respectively.
Perhaps the most interesting statistic to come out of the project is the sheer reliability of the hardware. The underwater servers were eight times more reliable than a replica data center built on land. The leading hypothesis behind this astonishing number is the benefits of the dry nitrogen atmosphere within the underwater pod, reducing corrosion, as well as the absence of meddling humans who may accidentally bump or damage hardware in regular land-based operations.
The team also collected samples of the atmosphere within the tube, aiming to determine the effect of outgassing from cables and other equipment inside. With a better understanding of the factors that led to such a large improvement in reliability, the Project Natick team hopes to improve reliability in traditional data centers, too.
Servers in the data center are retrieved for further study to determine the beneficial effects of underwater operation.
But you can seal racks of servers in nitrogen anywhere, why sink them to the bottom of the ocean? ..
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