Microsoft no longer sinks servers in the sea
The Natick project is over. Microsoft no longer operates any underwater servers. This is probably also due to the AI hype.
After two years under water, the Microsoft containers have formed a crust. Two men with high-pressure cleaners take care of the clean-up here.
(Image: Microsoft)
Microsoft has discontinued its studies on underwater data centers – the so-called Project Natick is finally history. In 2018, Microsoft sank 855 server containers on the coast of Scotland to investigate how the environment affects the hardware. In particular, cooling was to be improved by the seawater around the containers.
The containers were under water for a good two years without any maintenance. The result: 6 of the 855 servers broke down. At the same time, Microsoft operated 135 test servers with the same hardware on land, eight of which suffered defects. The defect rate of the underwater servers therefore fell from 0.59 to 0.07 percent.
Microsoft attributes this to the uniformly cool temperatures caused by the seawater. However, the nitrogen filling inside the containers may also have helped.
No longer a priority for Microsoft
Nevertheless, Microsoft is no longer pursuing the Natick project, as Noelle Walsh confirmed to Data Center Dynamics. As Corporate Vice President, Walsh leads the Cloud Operations + Innovation team.
"My team worked on it, and it worked. We learned a lot about operations below sea level and vibration and impacts on the server. So we'll apply those learnings to other cases", said Walsh.
A Microsoft spokesperson added: "While we don’t currently have data centers in the water, we will continue to use Project Natick as a research platform to explore, test, and validate new concepts around data center reliability and sustainability, for example with liquid immersion."
Microsoft is currently focusing on data centers for training AI algorithms and running them in the cloud. Small servers as cloud storage – like Project Natick – are simply no longer a priority.
These cloud data centers use hundreds to thousands of racks with as many accelerators as possible to train particularly large AI models. Due to their sheer size alone, such data centers can hardly be submerged under water. In addition, the operators frequently touch such servers, for example to expand the computing capacity or replace components. This is why Microsoft does not want to test nitrogen filling in data centers on land.
(mma)
