Photo: PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP
The global technology company Microsoft commissioned the development of a large Tubular Underwater Data Center, which contains 855 company servers. As its name suggests, the data center was placed at the bottom of the sea in the spring of 2018, in order to test its operation in underwater conditions.
This is, among other things, to avoid possible failures in the operation of Microsoft’s key servers, which in case of anomalies could greatly affect the services provided by the consortium.
The Submarine Data Center was located at a depth of almost 60 meters below the sea surface, off the coast of Scotland. Thus, Microsoft hoped to verify that this eliminates the temperature fluctuations that often cause problems for terrestrial servers.
In addition, the complex is designed to function autonomously, in such a way that “the possibility that some worker damages the equipment”, says the company itself.
Oxygen “harmful” for the servers
The absence of humans also allows the data center to have an oxygen-free environment, which was replaced by nitrogen, a gas “which is less corrosive” for servers and the rest of the machines involved.
Microsoft’s Undersea Data Center remained two years under the waters of the North Sea and, apparently, everything worked as expected by the technicians of the consortium.
At the end At the end of the test, it was found that only eight servers of the 855 contained in the data center had any anomaly. The percentage is only a fraction of failures that are typically reported on terrestrial servers.
Microsoft now collects information on all the factors that cause a lower rate of anomalies in the underwater data center, so that these conditions can be reproduced and implemented on a large scale.
Microsoft is even studying the possibility of creating a network of underwater data centers, which in theory will involve thousands of servers.