Micro .ft’s underwater Northern Isles data center has grown once againM Sea depth depth, company Announced on Monday, And it is remarkably intact except for those covered in the smell of the sea.

Micros .ft sunk data center 117 feet under water Off the coast of The Orkney Islands of Scotland In 2018 – looks like a huge, pneumatic fuel tank. After two years on the coast, it is now empty in moss, barn and cantaloupe-sized sea anemones. But Spencer Fowers, a researcher at Microsoft’s special projects, said in the announcement that the company was “very impressed” by the lack of “strong sea growth.”

Inside, 864 servers with a mass of 27.6 petabytes of storage and cooling infrastructure brave the elements In the atmosphere of inert gas – Microsoft noted that the conditions European Marine Energy Center Test site hours may include nine miles of tidal currents 60-foot waves during a storm. In fact, Microsoft claims that the equipment is better than land-based systems. Project play leader Ben Cutler stated in a blog post The Northern Isles have experienced only one-eighth of the failure rate expected in a traditional data center and it runs “really well” on the region’s energy grid, which is 100 percent wind and solar.

It justifies the ocean hypothesisThe floor is Preferred to go upstairs for server farms Where gear can be damaged due to corrosion of oxygen and moisture, there is a constant change in temperature and physical movement during maintenance. Placing data underwater can also enable close placement of customers and obviously make cooling easier., And Microsoft has previously suggested that they may be Powered by tidal generators. These units are also portable and can be easily scaled Large operation.

One obvious point is that repairs are impossible in Situ, although Microsoft wrote in a blog post that servers on light-out datacenters have changed twice in a decade. The company Hopefully the increased reliability of underwater servers means “Some who fail early are taken offline. “

This Reported the trend The potential environmental impact of underwater data centers in 2018 is unclear; A unit can be a nailigiImpact on local Temperature, but people in them can have significant effects on the shelf.

“While companies such as Microsoft can reap significant benefits in relocating data storage systems, the impact of any relocated structures in the marine environment, especially locally generated significant heat, needs to be examined,” said Gordon Watts, a Marine ecologist at the University of Portsmouth. Watts added that any site would need to be evaluated for environmental impact and that “IT is not so easy (at least in countries where they have advanced maritime planning law) just sticking something along the coast and getting it back after five years. “

There is also the problem of declining returns. Leeds Beckett University School Comp Dean Colin Pattinson, Dean of Computing, Creative Technologies and Engineering Said Wired In 2018, when underwater data centers are “worth a try,” the benefits of efficiency to reduce electricity needs are diminishing over time.

“Effectively what we’re trying to do now is to squeeze more savings from the same basic technological opportunity,” Pattinson told Wired.. “We can reduce the additional rate but there will still be an increase in the demand for producing space due to the amount of data that we are producing.”

The next phase of the project play demonstrates simplicity Removal and recycling.

“We are now at the stage of trying to use what we have done against the feeling of the need to move forward and prove more,” Cutler said in the statement.. “It simply came to our notice then. Natik is a key building block to use if the company is right. “