Tuesday 16 March 2010
At its annual partner conference in New Orleans on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled pricing details and launch plans for Windows Azure, the “cloud” operating system that Mr Ozzie hopes will become the online analogue to Windows on the personal computer – a platform that supports applications on the internet. Speaking last month at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the man who took on Bill Gates’s mantle as the company’s top technology visionary confessed Microsoft, when he arrived, was not ready for the challenges of the internet: “The PC was still at the centre of how people thought about everything. It was a bit scary. Part of his response was to bring together a small team of developers to work on Azure, treating it as a separate start-up.
Building the massive computing platform on which Azure depends, and refining it to run internet services with high efficiency and reliability, has ac counted for much of the development effort. Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief strategist, says there are now more than 1m servers in the company’s datacentres, making the Microsoft “cloud” one of the world’s biggest pieces of computing infrastructure. Even Mr Ozzie concedes that Amazon has set the pace in this new market although with technology giants such as IBM and Google also eyeing up the territory, the stakes are going up fast.
Microsoft’s energy management tool, Hohm, which launched this week, is a clear play to help consumers conserve energy. Log into the Hohm web site, enter your ZIP code and other details about your residence, and the service predicts your home energy use (or links to your historical energy use via your utility) and suggests ways to curb it. But Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, explained to us in an interview this week that Azure is expected to be more efficient than standard Web hosting and offer better power utilization, partly because the cloud takes advantage of on-demand scalable computing, growing and shrinking the amount of computing that’s applied to a particular task (and thus power used). In addition, the servers will feature efficient hardware designs and make better use of power management software, Mundie said.
We’ll forgive you if you thought Azure was just an outdated color in a Crayola box. Microsoft (MSFT) announced the cloud computing platform more than six months ago, and while few details are known about it, what is known is that it will be used by companies that want to deploy large Web services and host them in a cloud computing model. In the past, Microsoft would have allocated a couple of data centers to house Hohm, said Mundie. In that model, even if it were the middle of the night, the Web service would grind away in case there was a visitor. That meant it would be using more energy than needed. But with Azure’s setup, the servers are more like a car with different cylinders. “When they go uphill, we’ll turn them on, and when we’re coasting downhill, we’ll turn them off,” said Mundie.
However the networked computing world is tweaked, at the end of the day, it needs to more closely focus on using as little energy as possible. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, data centers currently consume 1.5% of total U.S. electricity, and that percentage is poised to more than double by 2011. In an increasingly broadband-connected world, in which a growing amount of our media, commerce, communications, and work life will be hosted in the cloud, energy conservation in IT will become extremely important. And who knows? Hohm’s legacy of being the first external Web service hosted on the energy-efficient Azure platform could stretch beyond its practical intentions to help reduce global energy consumption.
