– Updated – 07/07/2024 – Microsoft has discontinued its efforts to build a data center on the sea floor. “I’m not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world,” Noelle Walsh, the head of Microsoft’s Cloud Operations and Innovation division, told DatacenterDynamics.
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Two years ago, Microsoft sank a data center half a mile off Scotland’s Orkney Islands under 117 feet of North Sea water. Earlier this week, they dredged the shipping container-size data center of 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage back to the surface. Now that it has resurfaced – Microsoft (MSFT) researchers are studying how it survived its trip into Davy Jone’s locker and the trip can tell us about land-loving data centers.
Lower failure rate
Their first conclusion is that the cylinder with servers packed in like sardines had a lower failure rate than a conventional data center. Only eight out of the 855 servers on board had failed. Ben Cutler, a project manager in Microsoft’s Special Projects research group who leads Project Natick, said in a presser,
Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land.
The MSFT team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the fact that there were no humans on board. Microsoft’s John Roach explained:
The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land data centers.”They believe that land-loving data centers often run into issues like corrosion from oxygen, humidity and temperature fluctuations. and bumps and jostles from people who replace broken components.
Alternate power sources for data centers
Project Natick is also about addressing the huge energy demands of data centers as more and more of our data is stored in the cloud. All of Orkney’s electricity comes from alternate power sources, wind and solar power, which was not a problem for the underwater data center “Northern Isles.” Spencer Fowers, Microsoft’s Special Projects research group principal member of technical staff,
We have been able to run really well on what most land-based data centers consider an unreliable grid.
Not only can data centers run on alternative power, but they may not need the huge investment in dedicated buildings, rooms of batteries, and racks of UPS’s. Microsoft’s Fowers speculates;
We are hopeful that we can look at our findings and say maybe we don’t need to have quite as much infrastructure focused on power and reliability.
Underwater data center availability
Microsoft has clammed up about the availability of an underwater data center SKU, but MSFT’s Cutler is confident that it has proved the idea has value;
We think that we’re past the point where this is a science experiment … Now it’s simply a question of what do we want to engineer – would it be a little one, or would it be a large one?
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The drive to autonomous vehicles is just one case that explains MSFT’s idea of micro-self-contained data centers vs. mega-data centers. Even with 5G – computing power will have to move closer to the user, to the edge of the network. How much latency do you want as your autonomous Tesla, traveling 70 MPH tries to figure out where it is?
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.