Microsoft Project Natick: The Underwater Data Center Experiment

Automatically transcribed from the original recording. Small transcription errors may remain.

Watch out Amazon AWS, Microsoft just ran a cool experiment that can radically change the data center game. So currently, it takes significant time and effort to acquire and develop commercial real estate for data centers in a major city. But Microsoft recently launched Project Native, which is an unmanned data center put in a sealed pod, pumped with nitrogen, and strategically placed on the seafloor. Now the goal behind this was to make the deployment of data centers simpler and faster. And with seawater providing free cooling, you're also looking at radically reduced costs that are passed on to you, the consumer. So after a two-year deployment, Microsoft researchers concluded the underwater data center failed at one-eighth the rate of a traditional manned data center, partly due to the sealed nitrogen atmosphere. And without any oxygen for technicians to breathe or humidity, there are fewer opportunities for components' chemical corruption. Additionally, those same human operators' lack of bumping and jolting parts also contributed to the server's unusually low failure rate.