Project Natick is Microsoft Self Sustainable Deep Sea Data Center

Project Natick is Microsoft's self sustainable, deep sea data center, that is now operational on the seafloor near Scotland's Orkney Islands. The data center is using submarine technology and it is the result of a ten year working project.

Some of the main reasons for Microsoft to invest in such a project and create an "underwater" data center were the facts that classical data centers are very noisy, reach high temperatures and are very often inefficiently located.

In order to dive their underwater data center, the tech giant called Naval Group as an experienced helping hand for such an unique diving experience of their servers.

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12 racks of 864 servers are already processing workloads using renewable energy such as solar power, wind power and off-shore and tidal energy. Thanks to the low temperature of the water, the data center needs less cooling systems compared with the classical ones and only 0,25 MW of power when working at its full capacity.

It took a crew of 25 persons to install the submarine servers of Microsoft under water, in the vicinity of Orkney Islands near Scotland, and it will be closely monitored for 12 months, although it was designed to work flawlessly without any maintenance for five years.

For the moment Project Natick is working as a cloud computing infrastructure near heavily-populated areas. Although it is a bold project that will ensure a faster and smoother online experience for local communities it doesn't replaces the classical data centers.

Reference: https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/06/microsoft-s-deep-sea-data-center-is-now-opearational/