Thursday 29 July 2010
After slowing construction for several months, the heart and soul of Microsoft’s ‘cloud computing’ initiative is moving again. owever, if the company really wants to win the battle for cloud computing dominance as the concept catches on, Microsoft executives knew they had to ante up to build mega datacenters — bad economy or not. Microsoft will open a new 300,000 square foot datacenter in Dublin, Ireland — its first mega datacenter outside the U.S. — and the company plans to open its mammoth, 700,000 square foot Chicago datacenter on July 20, according to a blog post by Arne Josefsberg, general manager of Microsoft’s Infrastructure Services organization within Global Foundation Services.
The two most recent datacenters that Microsoft opened were a 477,000 square foot facility in San Antonio, Texas in September of last year, and a 500,000 square foot datacenter in Quincy, Wash. which opened in April 2007. Additionally, the datacenters will also support Ozzie’s Azure cloud application platform. In its two newest datacenters, Microsoft is trying to use the latest technology to contain costs for both equipment and electricity.
Containers conserve energy and will help us realize new advancements in power efficiency … These prepackaged units (with up to 1,800 to 2,500 servers each) can be wheeled into the facility and made operational within hours, so they represent important advances in the ability to quickly and efficiently provision capacity. The density inside the containers can exceed 10 times that of traditional data centers.
