Microsoft has immersed its experimental underwater data centers under the sea to determine their long-term prospects of operation. The software giant has conducted these experiments in its effort to improve service, reduce latencies, and cash-in on the ocean's beneficial qualities.
It is a well-known fact that electronics and seawater do not blend well, but as the results show, the prototype units of the software developer have performed quite well.
The three-month experiment was just completed by the software giant. It consisted of a server rack that has the equivalent of around 300 PCs housed in a water-tight cylinder which was dropped into the ocean just off the central California coast line.
Microsoft felt the need to conduct this experiment because it apparently found out that existing data centers are very inefficient. Although they are constructed where land and energy are cheap, they nevertheless waste excessive energy in cooling their huge computers.
This is where the company thought the ocean can come in. Microsoft believes that sea currents are able to generate enough energy to run sub-sea data centers. The ocean floor's cold temperature is able to cool the computer components inside the pod sufficiently.
Considering that around one half of the world's population live approximately 52 kilometers from the ocean, locating the data centers under the sea could possibly boost the speed by which they can access the information from Microsoft's cloud services.
According to Microsoft, the experiment with the codename Project Natick was a complete success that it encouraged the company to do it for 75 days, which is longer than what was planned. According to Peter Lee, the data centers even ran actual workloads of its customers. He is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research NExT.
"Our first experiment was like dipping our pinkie toe in the water, and now we're going for the big toe," Lee said.
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