Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Project Natick, which saw the deployment of a prototype submersible data center off the coast of Scotland, was a smashing success, according to the company. The data center performed better than on-land centers in the two-year trial period that it was submerged.
According to a press release from Microsoft, the undersea data center, which was submerged off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland, was hauled up from the bottom of the sea earlier in the summer. When retrieved, the submersible data center was covered in barnacles and sea anemones but was otherwise intact. Engineers tested the internal atmosphere of the capsule, finding that the dry-nitrogen atmosphere was still within acceptable limits. Upon removing the servers and their attached cooling units, all units were found to have been spared from any water damage.
Paramount among Microsoft's findings was that the undersea data center was more reliable than its counterpart, an identical server farm housed on land to serve as the control group. According to Microsoft, the undersea data center was eight times more reliable than the control unit on land. Microsoft explained the reliability resulting from the nitrogen atmosphere contained within the capsule, as nitrogen is less corrosive than oxygen. The lack of employees bumping into servers and causing increased wear and tear also significantly contributed to the reduced failure rate with the server farm.
Sustainability was also a critical factor in the project. The Orkney Islands are entirely supplied by wind and solar power, which meant that the servers were wholly powered by renewable energy. Being located underwater also provides an endless supply of coolant, negating the need for freshwater.
"We have been able to run really well on what most land-based datacenters consider an unreliable grid. 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," said Spencer Fowers, a member of the Project Natick staff at Microsoft.
Project Natick was incepted in 2014 at Microsoft's ThinkWeek, being proposed as a means of providing cloud services to coastal populations and cutting down on energy consumption. The initial test run was in 2015, with a 105-day test in the Pacific Ocean.