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Two years after sinking a datacentre off Orkney, Microsoft shares what it's learned

'We don't see Project Natick replacing land datacentres but being an additional offering, where we can deploy these faster than we can build land datacentres,' Microsoft's Spencer Fowers tells CRN

Underwater datacentres could be deployed faster than their land-based counterparts, suggests initial data from Microsoft's underwater datacentre project.

The vendor's Project Natick saw it drop an underwater container in the sea off the Orkney coast in 2018 to test the viability of sea-based datacentres. It was retrieved in July and initial results suggested that it can run well on what most land-based datacentres consider an unreliable grid.

Early data gathered indicated that sea-based datacentres can be deployed faster than land-based ones and it could potentially deploy more underwater datacentres as part of the scheme, according to Spencer Fowers, principal member of technical staff for Microsoft's special projects research group.

"We don't see Project Natick replacing land datacentres but being an additional offering, where we can deploy these faster than we can build land datacentres, and in locations that maybe we couldn't build a land datacentre. It's something that we hope gets utilised more in the future," he told CRN.

"We would love to continue to work on this project [and deploy more underwater datacentres]. It's definitely not a one and done a situation."

Fowers also responded to industry scepticism about the project, stating that there are a number of benefits to it other than the free cooling provided by the seawater.

"The ocean provides other benefits to us, such as consistency and temperature; when you're underwater, you don't get this fluctuation in temperature from summer to winter, or even day to night - it stays constant the whole time," he explained.

"Putting it off the coast also gets us closer to our customers; over 50 per cent of the world's population lives within 200 kilometres of the sea, and so by putting it off the coast, we're actually getting closer and reducing latency."

The project is still in its research stages, but it is hoped that information from it can be utilised in Microsoft's current datacentre technology, he added.

"We hope that some of the benefits that we found from Natick an actually be applied to our land-based data centres as well," he stated.

"There's going to be some additional work done during phase two [current stage], where we figure out how we can apply these learnings to land datacentres to improve the reliability of those."

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