From New Atlas, September 15:
Microsoft retrieves its experimental underwater data center
Data centers are fast becoming one of the most power-hungry industries, since they require such heavy-duty cooling and maintenance. Microsoft has now finished a two-year test of an unconventional solution – dropping a data center to the bottom of the sea – and found that it was more reliable than a similar land-based facility.....MUCH MORE
This milestone marks the end of Phase 2 of Project Natick, Microsoft’s long-running experiment with ocean-cooled data centers. The first phase took place over three months in 2015 off the Californian coast, and it was followed in early 2018 by a larger test facility dunked into the sea near the Orkney Islands of Scotland.
And now, after two years on the sea floor, this second phase facility has been hauled back to the surface, cleaned and examined. The 40-ft (12-m)-long container had been sitting 117 ft (36 m) below the waves, packing 12 server racks carrying 864 servers. The inside was deprived of oxygen and instead filled with dry nitrogen, and the servers were cooled by seawater pumped through radiators behind the racks and back out into the sea.
The idea was that a cool, stable environment like this would remove many of the disturbances faced by land-based data centers, including humidity, fluctuating temperatures, oxygen corrosion, and bumps by people wandering around the facility. In theory, the underwater servers should last longer than their landlubber counterparts....
Related at Data Center Dynamics: Cooling loss causes outage at Microsoft Azure's UK South region
Bringing down the country's Covid-19 tracking site
*See, if interested:
The Orkney Energy Miracle
Energy: Deep Time and an Uncertain Future on the Orkney Islands
Asking The Important Questions: "Hydrogen-powered gin distilling being investigated in Orkney"
