It is revealed that Microsoft has quietly ended its undersea data center operation project 'Project Natick'
It has become clear that Microsoft has ended its undersea data center operation project 'Project Natick' off the coast of Scotland, which had been carried out since 2018. Previous investigations have revealed that undersea machines are less likely to break down than general data centers on land.
Microsoft confirms Project Natick underwater data center is no more - DCD
Microsoft shelves its underwater data center — Project Natick had fewer server failures compared to servers on land | Tom's Hardware
The undersea data center operation experiment that Microsoft has been conducting since June 2018, called 'Project Natick,' involves sealing 12 server racks containing 855 servers and a total of 27.6 PB (petabytes) of storage in a metal container and sinking them in the sea off the coast of Scotland. Microsoft has claimed that the advantages of 'Project Natick' are 'the short period from installation to operation' and 'cooling the servers with seawater reduces the electricity costs required for cooling.'
Microsoft sets up underwater data center, clean specifications that run on renewable energy alone - GIGAZINE
Microsoft also set up 135 servers and two server racks on land, and conducted a comparative experiment with the underwater servers.
In 2020, the underwater data center was pulled to land. Experiments showed that servers on land had a lower failure rate, with 8 out of 135 servers failing, while only 6 out of 855 servers submerged underwater failed.
Microsoft's two-year project to develop a data center on the ocean floor, 'Project Natick,' is a success - GIGAZINE
Project Natick will end in June 2024. Noel Walsh, head of cloud operations and innovation at Microsoft, said, 'The project our team worked on was a success. We learned a lot from this project about working underwater and the effects of vibrations on servers. We will apply the lessons learned to other cases.'
According to Microsoft, the reason why the servers in the water were less likely to break down was due to the temperature stability of seawater, and also because the containers were filled with inert nitrogen gas to protect the servers.
'We are not currently conducting experiments to submerge servers in the ocean. However, we will use the data from Project Natick to explore and test new concepts for data center reliability and sustainability. One example is liquid immersion cooling ,' Walsh told CDC.
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