On Feb. 24, Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, announced a new research organization called Cloud Computing Futures (CCF), focused on reducing the operational costs of data centers and increasing their adaptability and resilience to failure. The group, led by Dan Reed, director of Scalable and Multicore Systems, will strive to lower hardware costs, power consumption, and the environmental impact of such facilities. Reed recently found time to discuss the new venture.
Q:What are you announcing, and why now?
Reed: Cloud Computing Futures is a new initiative in Microsoft Research to improve the efficiency of the scalable computing hardware and software infrastructure needed to deliver cloud services. Data centers and their services have grown in size and importance as Microsoft has shifted to a software-plus-services model in which an increasing number of new applications run in part, or entirely, in the “cloud” and are delivered to clients via the Internet.
Microsoft and other competitors, such as Yahoo, Amazon, Google, and IBM, have been building cloud-computing infrastructure and new software at a rapid pace to service the large number of potential users. Microsoft’s business now depends on an ever-expanding network of massive data centers: hundreds of thousands of servers, petabytes of data, hundreds of megawatts of power, and billions of dollars in capital and operational expenses. Because these data centers are being built with hardware and software technologies not designed for deployment at such massive scale, many of today’s data centers are expensive to build, costly to operate, and unable to provide all the services needed for emerging applications—resilience, geo-distribution, composability, and graceful recovery.
The goal of the CCF project is to identify, create, and evaluate new, potentially disruptive innovations that can enable new software and application capabilities while also reducing the cost of building and operating cloud services. The CCF project started with a key concept: treat the data center as an integrated system—a holistic entity—and optimize all aspects of hardware and software. As a result of this work, Microsoft will be able to deliver a wider range of new, innovative services more efficiently.
This work builds on deep technical partnerships and collaborations across Microsoft—Microsoft Research, Global Foundation Services, Cloud Infrastructure Services/Azure™, and product teams—and we are working with an array of hardware-technology providers and companies.
