Two years ago, Microsoft announced that it started its Project Natick experiment. It was about putting a data center under the sea, and the result has been a complete success.
His idea was that by not having oxygen and being isolated from outside humidity as if it were a data center in a building, they would have fewer problems. So they put twelve racks with 864 servers under the sea near Orkney Islands in Scotland.
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Under the sea, next to the fish, the servers work very well
According to the commission that has been tracking Project Natick's process, they have had a much better failure rate than a normal data center. Eight times less problems by putting them in isolation under the sea.
They noted that, for example, seawater helps cool those servers and therefore helps cool their components. And they don't need a large infrastructure to store all those servers. They just needed some metal racks. It is also seen that it was powered by renewable energy, by means of wind energy, solar and more.
So far the experiment has gone really well. It remains to be seen if they decide to scale Project Natick to make it much larger and expand the capacity of the project and the servers of Microsoft services. Now that more and more services are coming as a business, having more servers spread throughout the world is the ideal. The problem here may be the rental of spaces under the sea, and the possible problems for fauna and flora since the sea is one of the spaces most sensitive to changes in temperature and its structure. But if they can solve or minimize these problems, we may be facing an important part of the future of data centers.
