Naval Group | Project Natick
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In June 2018, Naval Group led the successful installation of the 450kW subsea data centre at EMEC’s Billia Croo wave energy test site, on the west coast of the Orkney mainland. Installation was carried out by local marine contractor Green Marine.
The operation was part of Phase 2 of Microsoft’s ‘Project Natick’, a research project investigating the numerous potential benefits that a standard, manufacturable, deployable undersea data centre could provide. The project is part of Microsoft’s ongoing quest for cloud data centre solutions that are less resource intensive and offer rapid provisioning, lower costs, and high agility to meet the needs of cloud users around the world.
Deepwater deployment offers ready access to cooling, a controlled environment, and has the potential to be powered by co-located renewable power sources, such as the pioneering wave and tidal energy technologies testing nearby at EMEC’s test sites.
The data centre, which was as powerful as several thousand high end consumer PCs and had enough storage for about five million movies, was initially anticipated to remain on site for around one year, but ended up testing for a second year.
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Further details on the project are available on Microsoft’s blog: The Orkney Islands in Scotland just became one of the most exciting places in tech
The project was partly supported by the INTERREG NWE FORESEA programme which has facilitated continuous remote monitoring from the Microsoft team based in Washington, USA.
The data centre was retrieved over summer 2020 with Microsoft finding that the concept of underwater datacenters is feasible, as well as logistically, environmentally and economically practical.
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About Naval Group
Naval Group is a European leader in naval defence. As an international high-tech company, Naval Group uses its extraordinary know-how, unique industrial resources and capacity to arrange innovative strategic partnerships to meet its customers requirements. The group offers a wide range of marine renewable energy solutions. Attentive to corporate social responsibility, Naval Group adhere to the United Nations Global Compact. The group reports revenues of 3ドル.7 bilion and has a workforce of 13,429 (data for 2017).
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Project Natick’s Northern Isles datacenter is partially submerged and cradled by winches and cranes between the pontoons of an industrial catamaran-like gantry barge. At the deployment site, a cable containing fiber optic and power wiring was attached to the Microsoft datacenter, and then the datacenter and cable lowered foot-by-foot 117 feet to the seafloor. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
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Project Natick’s Northern Isles datacenter is barged under a gantry crane in preparation for deployment on the seafloor near the Orkney Islands in Scotland. Microsoft is researching whether it’s possible to use the existing logistics supply chain to ship and rapidly deploy modular datacenters anywhere in the world, even in the roughest patches of sea. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
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Microsoft’s Project Natick team gathers on a barge tied up to a dock in Scotland’s Orkney Islands in preparation to deploy the Northern Isles datacenter on the seafloor. Pictured from left to right are Mike Shepperd, senior R&D engineer, Sam Ogden, senior software engineer, Spencer Fowers, senior member of technical staff, Eric Peterson, researcher, and Ben Cutler, project manager. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
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Spencer Fowers, senior member of technical staff for Microsoft’s special projects research group, prepares Project Natick’s Northern Isles datacenter for deployment off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. The datacenter is secured to a ballast-filled triangular base that rests on the seafloor. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
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Spencer Fowers, senior member of technical staff for Microsoft’s special projects research group, prepares Project Natick’s Northern Isles datacenter for deployment off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. The datacenter is secured to a ballast-filled triangular base that rests on the seafloor. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
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Project Natick’s Northern Isles datacenter is partially submerged and cradled by winches and cranes between the pontoons of an industrial catamaran-like gantry barge. At the deployment site, a cable containing fiber optic and power wiring was attached to the Microsoft datacenter, and then the datacenter and cable lowered foot-by-foot 117 feet to the seafloor. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
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Spencer Fowers (L), senior member of technical staff for Microsoft’s special projects research group, and Eric Peterson (R), a Microsoft mechanical engineer, check 12 racks of servers to be loaded into Project Natick’s 12.2-meter long Northern Isles datacenter at a Naval Group facility in Brest, France. Photo by Frank Betermin.
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Project Natick’s Northern Isles datacenter is partially submerged and cradled by winches and cranes between the pontoons of an industrial catamaran-like gantry barge. On deployment day, the winds were calm and seas flat under a thick coat of fog. "For us, it was perfect weather," said Ben Cutler, a project manager in the special projects group within Microsoft’s research organization. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures.
