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Microsofthas officially killed off Project Natick, its underwater data center experiment, which began life in 2015.
My team worked on it, and it worked.
We learned a lot about operations below sea level and vibration and impacts on the server.
So we’ll apply those learnings to other cases."
Moving towards robotics
The underwater data center project was first testedoff the coast of Scotland in 2018.
Microsoft placed 855 servers underwater for over two years, and only six of them failed.
For comparison, eight out of 135 servers failed in a similar land test.
In percentage terms, thats 0.7% failure rate underwater versus a 5.9% rate on land.
Microsoft is exploring other advanced technologies, like robotics, to improve data center operations.
How can we automate that versus having people push things around?
We are learning from other industries on robotics, but we’re also very cognizant that we need people.
I don’t want people worried about their jobs.
The tech giant is also considering other ways of powering data centers including looking intomodular nuclear reactors.
