Microsoft has set up a data center in the ocean, clean specifications with electricity also covered by renewable energy alone

Microsoft announced that it installed the data center in the sea. According to Microsoft, this data center is set up in the sea off the coast of Scotland, and it operates only with renewable energy.

Project Natick Phase 2
http://natick.research.microsoft.com/

Microsoft Just Put a Data Center on the Bottom of the Ocean - Motherboard
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pavq99/microsoft-project-natick-submarine-data-center

The data center announced by Microsoft has a container-type structure sealed with metal to prevent the entry of water from the outside, and a submarine cable is also connected to enable external power supply and communication . There are 12 server racks loaded with 864 servers and 27.6 PB of storage in the container, and the server administrator remotely manipulates servers in the center after installation in the sea I will.


One of the advantages of this data center is Microsoft's "period from installation to operation". Normally, it takes about two years to build a data center and advance the system to operation, but this time the underwater data center set up by Microsoft has reduced this process to about 90 days . In addition, it is possible to cool the server with seawater by installing it in the sea, and it is also listed as one of the features that you can suppress the electricity cost required for cooling.


The data center announced this time is set up in the sea near Scotland's Orkney Islands. Because the Orkney islands are suitable for wind power generation and tidal power generation, it is known that large-scale clean energy power generation facilities exist, and the data center established by Microsoft is only renewable energy supplied from the Orkney Islands We are going to run it.

In server operation, when power outage due to hardware malfunction or system trouble occurs, it is imperative that you need emergency response to operate the server directly rather than remotely. In the case of a data center installed by Microsoft in this time, it is expected that the data center will have to be pulled up to sea once for emergency response, and it will be impossible to respond smoothly. However, Microsoft did not mention emergency response and seemed to recognize it as one of future tasks.

The data center that Microsoft set up off the coast of Scotland is explained in detail in the following movie.

Microsoft tests Project Natick, self-sustaining underwater datacenter - YouTube