Microsoft retrieved a 40-foot-long, 12-rack, self-contained underwater data center from its seafloor home offshore from the Orkney Islands earlier this summer.
The retrieval of the Northern Isles began the final phase of Microsoft’s Project Natick research initiative, exploring the concept of deploying sealed server pods just offshore major population centers as a replacement for traditional onshore data centers.
Why put servers underwater?
On the day of its 2018 deployment, the Northern Isles sported a gleaming white paint job with colorful Microsoft logo. Two years underwater isn’t kind to that sort of thing, though… Scott Eklund
Project Natick has been underway for several years; we covered the two-month trial deployment of Leona Philpot, the company’s first underwater server pod, in 2016, and the deployment of the newly retrieved Orkney Isles pod in 2018.
The potential disadvantage of sealed underwater “data centers” is obvious—they must be extremely reliable, since they can’t be serviced on a regular basis. There is a somewhat less intuitive, counterbalancing advantage, of course—they don’t have any pesky humans wandering around inside them, potentially dislodging cables, unplugging things, or otherwise injecting chaos.
There are more advantages to these miniature underwater data centers. Seafloor-based pods don’t require expensive commercial real estate, and they get nearly free cooling from the surrounding tons of seawater.
The logistic advantage may be even more important than the cooling or immediate financial one. It takes significant time and specialized effort to acquire and develop commercial real estate for a traditional data center in a major city—building a sealed pod and deploying it on the seafloor nearby should be considerably simpler and faster.
Retrieving the Northern Isles
The Northern Isles was towed back to dock partially submerged, carried between the beams of a gantry barge. Jonathan Banks
The Northern Isles underwater data center pod was built by Naval Group (a defense and renewable marine energy contractor) and is locally supported by Green Marine, an Orkney Island-based marine engineering and operations firm. It spent two years beneath the water at the European Marine Energy Centre, where tidal currents peak at 9mph and storm waves reach 60 feet or more.
Both deployment and retrieval of the Northern Isles needed particularly calm weather and a full day of careful work involving robots and winches between the pontoons of a gantry barge. In the course of the pod’s two years underwater, it acquired a coating of algae and barnacles, as well as cantaloupe-sized sea anemones colonizing sheltered nooks in its base.