With Project Natick, Microsoft is like SpongeBob -- puts data center under the sea

[Batu69]

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SpongeBob SquarePants! Depending on your age, you might absolutely adore that character or possibly not be familiar at all. Me? I fall into the former. While it is a kids show, I find it to be quite entertaining.

 

You know who else might be a fan of Mr. SquarePants? Microsoft. Yes, believe it or not, the company has built an underwater data center, located in California, named 'Project Natick' for the ocean. In other words, like SpongeBob, the data center will live under the sea. While it is only in a testing phase, it is still cool nonetheless. Hopefully it operates quietly, however, as if it is noisy, it might bother Squidward's clarinet playing.

 

"It all started in 2013 when Microsoft employee, Sean James, who served on a US Navy submarine submitted a ThinkWeek Paper. Norm Whitaker read the paper and built a team to explore the idea of placing computers or even entire datacenters in water. In late 2014, Microsoft kicked off Project Natick. The rest is history", says Microsoft.

 

The big question you should be asking, of course, is why is Microsoft is doing this? The answer is surprisingly simple -- heat. Data centers run very hot and require intense cooling from air-conditioning. Not only does this cost the owner a lot of money in energy bills, but it can be bad for the environment too.

 

The carbon footprint from the world's combined data centers is likely astronomical. If you can harness the cooling of the deep ocean's waters, by using it to dissipate heat naturally, you can arguably reduce costs and reduce the strain on the environment.

 

Ben Cutler, a Microsoft employee and engineer on the project tells the New York Times, "when I first heard about this I thought, 'Water ... electricity, why would you do that?' But as you think more about it, it actually makes a lot of sense".

 

Of course, despite the potential environmental benefits, there are unknown risks too. Could the heat given off by the data center impact the natural habitat of the sea life? Even if local temperature increases are slight, it could be enough to disrupt a balance. More research and testing will likely be needed to determine if Project Natick is a risk-free proposal.

 

 

Plus, lets be honest here folks; electronics and water generally don't mix well. True, some computers are liquid-cooled with minimal risk and maintenance, but a data center in the ocean is faced with extreme pressure -- a leak could prove disastrous.

 

It may be quite a while before a company truly trusts its precious data under the sea. Luckily, Microsoft has installed sensors on Project Natick to monitor just how harsh the ocean's impact will be on it.

 

 Project Natick

 

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[SURbit]

Such data centers could reduce data latency for users who live near the ocean.

Companies are finding some of the oddest locations for data centers these days.

 

Facebook, for example, built a data center in Lulea in Sweden because the icy cold temperatures there would help cut the energy required for cooling. A proposed Facebook data center in Clonee, Ireland, will rely heavily on locally available wind energy. Google's data center in Hamina in Finland uses sea water from the Bay of Finland for cooling.

 

Now, Microsoft is looking at locating data centers under the sea.

The company is testing underwater data centers with an eye to reducing data latency for the many users who live close to the sea and also to enable rapid deployment of a data center.

 

Microsoft, which has designed, built, and deployed its own subsea data center in the ocean, in the period of about a year, started working on the project in late 2014, a year after Microsoft employee, Sean James, who served on a U.S. Navy submarine, submitted a paper on the concept.

 

A prototype vessel, named the Leona Philpot after an Xbox game character, operated on the seafloor about 1 kilometer from the Pacific coast of the U.S. from August to November 2015, according to a Microsoft page on the project.

 

The subsea data center experiment, called Project Natick after a town in Massachusetts, is in the research stage and Microsoft warns it is "still early days" to evaluate whether the concept could be adopted by the company and other cloud service providers.

"Project Natick reflects Microsoft’s ongoing quest for cloud datacenter solutions that offer rapid provisioning, lower costs, high responsiveness, and are more environmentally sustainable," the company said.

 

Using undersea data centers helps because they can serve the 50 percent of people who live within 200 kilometers from the ocean. Microsoft said in an FAQ that deployment in deepwater offers "ready access to cooling, renewable power sources, and a controlled environment." Moreover, a data center can be deployed from start to finish in 90 days.

 

Microsoft is weighing coupling the data center with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity, according to the New York Times.

The company is targeting the lifespan of the data center to be at least 20 years. After that it will be salvaged and recycled. The company is also considering a "deployment cycle" of 5 years each, which is the anticipated lifespan of the computers in it. "After each 5-year deployment cycle, the datacenter would be retrieved, reloaded with new computers, and redeployed," according to the Microsoft FAQ.

 

A new trial is expected to begin next year, possibly near Florida or in Northern Europe, Microsoft engineers told NYT. The engineers even ran commercial data-processing projects from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.

 

On community forums, some users questioned whether an undersea data center could have an environmental impact, including the heating up of the water around the data center. But Microsoft claimed on its website that the project envisages the use of data centers that would be totally recycled and would also have zero emissions, when located along with offshore renewable energy sources.

 

"No waste products, whether due to the power generation, computers, or human maintainers are emitted into the environment," it said, pointing out that the data center does not consume water for cooling or any other purpose. "During our deployment of the Leona Philpot vessel, sea life in the local vicinity quickly adapted to the presence of the vessel," it added.

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[Batu69]

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