Microsoft's Underwater Data centre resurfaces after two years, find out what happened

In 2018, the Giant American Multinational corporation Microsoft had sunk an entire data centre to the bottom of the Scottish sea. Under Project Natick, Microsoft had overseen the plunging 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage,117 feet deep into the ocean. On September 14, the company reported on its official website that the underwater data centre experiment had been a success and had revealed findings which had startled many engineers. 

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Microsoft Underwater Data centre plunged into the sea

From the outside throwing an entire data centre into the bottom of the ocean may seem strange, however, Microsoft’s Project Natick team did exactly that. The engineers hypothesised that placing the Microsoft Underwater data centre would result in more reliable and energy-efficient data centres. And in 2018 they went all in and actually tested their hypothesis.

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What did the Microsoft engineers find?

According to a report on Microsoft’s official website, on land, data centres often run into issues like corrosion from oxygen, humidity and controlling shifts in temperatures. However, the story was different underwater. In a water-tight environment with tight temperature control, very few issues cropped up in the two years that the Microsoft Underwater Data Centre. Microsoft has also mentioned that these kind of servers are easier to deploy in the coasts. They end up being very useful for coastal areas which are less connected with the cities as with the help of this server, they locals can have access to cloud-based resources.

Source: Microsoft

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What is the point of the Microsoft Underwater Data Centre?

Microsoft has stated on its official website that the benefit of the underwater datacenter and of Project Natick is going to be huge in future. The Microsoft underwater data centre reportedly has only one-eighth the failure rate of a land-based data centre, which in the world of engineering and technology is a dramatic improvement. The lower failure rate is important for the company as it’s much tougher to service a busted server when it’s sunk in an airtight container at the bottom of the ocean.

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This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has tried something this atypical. The company has been exploring the idea of submerged servers since 2015. Back in 2015 engineers at Microsoft had dunked a data centre off the coast of California for several months to test the concept and see if the computers would even survive the trip. This time the round of trials was for a far longer amount of time given the Microsoft data centre remained dunked for two years