Depending on the size of the company, some data centers are small, or in the case of companies like Apple, Microsoft, or Facebook, they have massive data centers that span acres of land. However the downside to the placement is not only do they take up land space, but they also require a fair amount of air-conditioning to keep cool, because let’s face it, the desert can be pretty hot.
However Microsoft thinks that they might have found a solution to that problem, and that is by taking these data centers underwater. Codenamed Project Natick, Microsoft has actually been exploring this idea way back in 2013 when employees wrote a white paper about the concept of an underwater data center.
According to Ben Cutler, a Microsoft computer designer who worked on the project, “When I first heard about this I thought, ‘Water … electricity, why would you do that?’ But as you think more about it, it actually makes a lot of sense.” By keeping the data centers underwater, it helps to cool the systems for “free”.
However it is not so cut and dry. There are other factors like environmental (like how the capsules could affect ocean life) and technical that needs to be taken into consideration. After all it won’t be as easy to send a technician under water to fix problems compared to if the data centers were on land. It will be a while before such data centers become a reality, but in the meantime Microsoft is expected to test out a larger system come 2017.
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