Microsoft built underwater data centre

The first prototype, christened the Leona Philpot after a popular Xbox game character in Halo, has been retrieved from the seafloor and taken to the firm’s Redmond headquarters for analysis and refitting. The idea that data centres could be potentially off-grid and “off-land” pieces of hardware could tick a lot of boxes for a future world. A large portion of the world’s population lives near coastlines, and having data centers near those coasts could improve the performance of cloud-based services such as Netflix.

The project itself is still in the research stages but, Microsoft claims that it is a forward-looking solution to deal with the rising energy demands at data centres.

“Deepwater deployment offers ready access to cooling, renewable power sources and a controlled environment”, Microsoft says. Microsoft has not only found a way to do that, but also to make the data centers faster and greener.

Update: Today. Microsoft has published a long blog post about Project Natick, and video, embedded below.

In what sounds more like science fiction than science fact, Microsoft is seeking to emulate the likes of Facebook (FB) and Google companies who have already made forays into underwater data systems technology.

Clearly it was impossible to man a tiny capsule 30 feet underwater and was operated remotely from a Microsoft campus. “If you define critical mass by the fact that you have so much data you cannot analyse it – and that is where the value is – and companies can not get their arms around it, [then you have a problem]”.

Microsoft Corporation’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) recent project is named Natick.

While data centers have grown increasingly automated, allowing them to balloon in their capacity without adding headcount to manage them, there aren’t a lot of data centers with no IT personnel at all.

In the latest installment of the Mission Impossible films, Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt was almost killed in his efforts to steal data from an underwater data center off the coast of Morocco.

Wastage of gigantic amount of energy in the process of cooling the current data centers prompted Microsoft to conduct such a unique experiment, reports The New York Times. The company also says that the self-contained units can be deployed quickly, within 90 days, rather than the 2 years it takes to build a conventional building, or the 1 year that Microsoft says its fourth generation data centers take. Sensors were placed on the capsule to test various sensors that measure things such as water pressure, leak events, humidity, etc. With a successful trial run, they plan to sink capsules three times in size into the ocean beginning next year.