Credit: Microsoft

And I thought you weren’t supposed to drop your computer in the bathtub!

One of the cardinal rules of electronic ownership is thus: important hardware plus large body of water equals a bad time. But theoretically speaking, if you could submerge a computer in the water, what would the practical applications be? I don’t think anyone’s in a rush to browse Twitter in a diving suit, but there is an attractive possibility for data storage. This was the possibility Microsoft was exploring when they sank a big honkin’ data center to the bottom of the ocean two years ago.

That data center was retrieved today. After hosing off all the grime and barnacles, the techs went to work checking the thing’s structural integrity. While some of the electronics in the center did fail, surprisingly, the failure rate for the center in the ocean was actually lower than failure rates seen in data centers kept on land. Microsoft’s researchers have speculated that since the center’s capsule was sealed with nitrogen instead of oxygen, there were less elements inside that could corrode the circuits. It was also nice and cold at the bottom of the ocean, which is great if you’re sinking a gigantic tube of high-power computers.

Credit: Microsoft

The data center was also able to remain fully powered during the entire experiment. This is interesting, as the center’s power source, the nearby Orkney, exclusively uses solar and wind power, which says some promising things about the use of green energy in data infrastructure. In addition to being a fascinating experiment on what computers can withstand, the use of underwater data centers could be potentially beneficial for security purposes. Data infrastructure can be vulnerable on land, but at the bottom of the ocean, it’d be much safer from natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

“We think that we’re past the point where this is a science experiment,” says project lead Ben Cutler. “Now it’s simply a question of what do we want to engineer – would it be a little one, or would it be a large one?”