HWM (Singapore)

Project Natick

Microsoft’s experiment­al datacenter lives under the water.

- By Alvin Soon

Microsoft has recently deployed a datacenter in Scotland. There’s nothing unusual about that, except this datacenter was installed underwater, on the seaoor off the Orkney Islands.

The Northern Isles datacenter marks phase two of Microsoft’s Project Natick. The project is a years-long research effort looking into sustainabl­e, prepackage­d datacenter units, which can be deployed on the seaoor without maintenanc­e.

Phase one, in 2016, tested a prototype that ran underwater for 105 days. Phase two’s Northern Isles datacenter is designed to operate under the sea for ve years without maintenanc­e. The 40-foot long container holds 12 racks with 864 servers. And it runs on clean energy; the datacenter gets its electricit­y from wind farms.

The most obvious reason for setting up datacenter­s in cold bodies of water is that they would be easy to cool. Servers generate a large amount of heat, and cooling them is expensive. It’s why companies like Facebook and Google have built data centers in near-arctic ground.

A less obvious reason to run a datacenter in the sea is that more than half of the world’s population lives near a coast. Datacenter­s near coastal cities would shorten the distance between server and client. The closer your smartphone or PC is to a server, the more likely it is you’ll get a faster, more stable connection.

The Project Natick team will spend the next year assessing the Northern Isles datacenter’s performanc­e. Project Natick remains a research project, but it could one day lead to more clouds under the sea.

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