Microsoft hails heightened reliability of servers run in sub-sea datacentres

Airing out the datacentre

Ahead of the datacentre’s original submersion, the vessel was filled with dry nitrogen to create a “benign” atmosphere inside, with another element of the experiment focusing on how this might affect the operating environment of the computer equipment inside.

One of the standout findings of the experiment is that the servers running inside the underwater datacentre were eight times more reliable than those on land, and the presence of nitrogen may have played a part in this, the Project Natick team suggests, as it is a less corrosive gas than oxygen.

“Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” said Ben Cutler, a project manager in Microsoft’s Special Projects research group.

“I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land. We are considerably better than that.”

Another notable finding from the project is that the underwater facility was able to run “really well”, said Microsoft, despite being fed renewable power from what would be considered an “unreliable grid” to power a land-based facility.

“We are hopeful that we can look at our findings and say maybe we don’t need to have quite as much infrastructure focused on power and reliability,” said Spencer Fowers, a principal member of technical staff for Microsoft’s special projects research group.

Lessons in latency

The lessons learned from Project Natick are also being used to inform Microsoft’s edge computing strategy for its Azure public cloud datacentres, so that the firm can work out where best to host “tactical and critical” workloads, the company said.

“We are populating the globe with edge devices, large and small to learn how to make datacentres reliable enough not to need human touch is a dream of ours,” said William Chappell, vice-president of mission systems for Azure, elsewhere in the blog post.

The underwater datacentre concept has previously been billed by Microsoft as a good way to regulate the temperature of datacentres in a more energy efficient way, as the underwater surroundings negates the need for expensive mechanical cooling systems.

The company has also been quick to talk up the latency benefits of offshore datacentres in the past, by offering up the statistic that with half the world’s population living within 200km of an ocean, subsea builds have the potential to significantly cut down data transfer times to user sites.