Microsoft is planning to dive underwater in the future with its prototype data center that it tested hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, recently in California. Under Project Natick, data centre’s will live under the sea in order to tackle high energy costs and control the carbon footprint.
Microsoft thinks it’s found a way to cut the high energy costs of cooling data centers: By putting them under water. Company researchers tried out the concept by placing a prototype self-contained data center pod 30-feet under water off the coast of San Luis Obispo, Calif., and running it for 105 days, according to the New York Times.
Data centre’s generate a lot of heat and require intense cooling from air-conditioning, failing which they may crash. This costs IT & technology companies like Microsoft a lot of money in energy bills, besides being bad for the environment. Submarine-like data centre’s, which could use tidal-fueled turbines to generate power as ocean water is cooler than ambient air, could drastically bring down air-conditioning costs.
With Microsoft managing more than 100 data centre’s around the globe and rapidly adding to that count, such a project if successful could work wonders for the firm. The company has already spent more than $15bn on a global data Centre system that now provides more than 200 online services.
Talking of how Microsoft came up with such an idea, the company told New York Times, “It all started in 2013 when Microsoft employee, Sean James, who served on a US Navy submarine submitted a ThinkWeek Paper. Norm Whitaker read the paper and built a team to explore the idea of placing computers or even entire data centers in water. In late 2014, Microsoft kicked off Project Natick. The rest is history.”
According to Microsoft; Project Natick is a Microsoft research project to manufacture and operate an underwater datacenter. The initial experimental prototype vessel, christened the Leona Philpot after a popular Xbox game character, was operated on the seafloor approximately one kilometer off the Pacific coast of the United States from August to November of 2015. Project Natick reflects Microsoft’s ongoing quest for cloud datacenter solutions that provide rapid provisioning, lower costs, high responsiveness, and are more environmentally sustainable.
“It all started in 2013 when Microsoft employee, Sean James, who served on a US Navy submarine submitted a ThinkWeek Paper. Norm Whitaker read the paper and built a team to explore the idea of placing computers or even entire datacenters in water. In late 2014, Microsoft kicked off Project Natick. The rest is history”, says Microsoft.
Ben Cutler, a Microsoft employee and engineer on the project tells the New York Times, “When I first heard about this I thought, ‘Water … electricity, why would you do that?’ But as you think more about it, it actually makes a lot of sense”.
The Microsoft researchers believe that by mass producing the capsules, they could shorten the deployment time of new data centers from the two years it now takes on land to just 90 days, offering a huge cost advantage. The underwater server containers could also help make web services work faster.
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