ms datacenters : Arne Josefsberg

Microsoft Celebrates Chicago Data Center Grand Opening

msdcblog — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:14:00 GMT

Containers Increase IT Efficiency of Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Microsoft’s cloud computing infrastructure takes another big step forward this week with the grand opening of our Chicago data center. At more than 700,000 square feet, this facility significantly expands our ability to meet the demand generated from our Live, Online, and Cloud Computing services offerings for our customers. Combined with the grand opening of our Dublin, Ireland, data center last week to expand our capacity and network throughout EMEA, the opening in Chicago demonstrates how Microsoft is expanding capacity around the world to support its online businesses and customers.

Investing in turbulent economic times is always a tough choice – one that Microsoft is clearly making by investing in technology and innovation in a thoughtful and measured manner with an eye towards long-term growth for our customers, our shareholders, and our business. Microsoft’s data centers represent the infrastructure foundation of the company’s cloud services offerings and demonstrate how Microsoft is positioning itself to compete and succeed with an approach we call Software plus Services. Microsoft’s Software plus Services strategy is designed to create computing experiences that offer both the best of client technology and the best of the Web to connect people, data, devices, and applications.

One of many reasons we decided to hold a grand opening of the Chicago facility is to share our best practices. While in one sense our best practices are competitive advantages for Microsoft, we hope they will also help others in the industry make the cloud a safer and more reliable place that companies can trust for their operations. Very few companies can make the infrastructure investment that Microsoft has, so we think it is important to share what we’ve learned with the industry.

The first phase of the Chicago data center represents 30 megawatts of critical power. An additional 30 megawatts is pre-positioned for future growth. This incremental approach means customers today will enjoy top-notch performance and availability while we control costs for Microsoft and its shareholders.

One aspect of this data center that I’d like to talk about in some detail here involves our continued focus on environmental best practices.

Through the use of pre-manufactured, standard shipping containers, each of which house approximately 1,800 to 2,500 servers (as we’ve noted in previous blogs), we are able to realize greater conservation of energy and deliver new advancements in power efficiency. In addition, the isolated nature of containers enables Microsoft and its vendors to research new approaches around power and cooling alternatives to reduce energy consumption even more in the future.

Inside view of a container in the Chicago data center.

The Chicago facility is one of the largest data centers in the world to use containers. The entire first floor is devoted to parking stalls for containers, which will eventually house more than two-thirds of all the servers in the data center. The containers plug into standard interfaces called “CBlox” that we have developed with our partners. This interface provides a kind of “plug and play” for data center containers (for those of you who have been around long enough to remember when Microsoft developed “Plug and Play” for Windows).

See the video of containers being installed in the new Chicago facility.

Containers provide further environmental benefits in that they don’t require additional packaging materials or external form factors for the thousands of servers that they house. They also require less cabling and other equipment that all add up to unnecessary waste in traditional data center designs. Containers are also a very efficient way to quickly deploy capacity.

Another best practice we are using in Chicago is water-side economization, which enables us to cool the facility without requiring the high levels of electricity typically needed to power large chillers. Environmental sustainability is in Microsoft’s DNA and the Chicago data center serves as a great example.

I’d also like to talk about the incredible quality and amount of work that went into this data center, as well as the investments Microsoft has made in the local community throughout this project. Building this state-of-the-art facility generated approximately 3,000 construction-related jobs with a peak workforce of around 1,100 workers. More than 1.5 million man-hours of labor went into the project, and the total investment in the facility will top $500 million over time.

This week’s grand opening provides us the opportunity to thank those who helped turn our vision for the Chicago data center into reality. The facility actually began operations on July 20, delivering online services to our customers. It is gratifying to reflect on this achievement as we plan our next advances to move data center sustainability and efficiency forward for Microsoft, our customers, and the industry.

Arne

Arne Josefsberg,

General Manager of Infrastructure Services

Global Foundation Services

Microsoft

Dublin Data Center Celebrates Grand Opening

msdcblog — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Environmental advances and expanded international computing delivered

This is a big week for Microsoft’s online, live, and cloud services as we celebrate the grand opening of our new data center in Dublin, Ireland. The Dublin facility delivers two key advances for Microsoft’s Software plus Services initiatives. One is expanded support for all our customers in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, thanks to Microsoft’s first mega data center built outside of the U.S. The other is dramatically improved environmental sustainability, resulting from innovative technology that takes advantage of the naturally cool climate in Ireland.

Regarding expanded international support, the new data center is already playing an important role in helping meet growing customer demand for Microsoft services in Europe and beyond. The facility, which began operations on July 1, 2009, currently covers 303,000 square feet, with 5.4 mega watts of critical power available to deliver services to consumers and business customers. Over time, the data center can expand to a total of 22.2 mega watts of critical power to support our growing cloud services. Combined with our other new mega data center in Chicago, Illinois—which we’ll celebrate the grand opening of next week on September 30—Microsoft is taking significant steps forward in our cloud computing capabilities.

It is important to note that at both facilities we will ramp up capacity incrementally to meet increases in customer demand. We are making thoughtful, measured investments in order to contain costs at the same time that we build out our infrastructure to deliver a secure cloud foundation, with robust performance and availability for services around the world.

Regarding the environment and Green IT factors, Microsoft is leveraging a combination of natural environmental factors to dramatically improve the environmental sustainability of the Dublin data center as compared to traditionally-built data centers. The average temperature range year round in Dublin is between 23 to 80 degrees F (-5 to 27 degrees C) and that, combined with the use of air-side economization, results in “free cooling” (chiller-free) operations 100% year round under normal operating conditions. This in turn significantly reduces water consumption and the use of chemicals required to treat cooling towers, which are common throughout the data center industry but not required in our Dublin facility.

Air-handling units on the roof of the data center (see photos above and below) draw outside air down into the facility to cool the server rooms, and then return hot air back out to the roof. Traditional data centers, on the other hand, cool server rooms with chillers, which consume a great deal of power and water. No chillers are used in the Dublin data center. The outside air that cools the facility is usually lower than the 95 degree F limit for our server rooms. If it ever exceeds that temperature, or in the extremely rare event of external air quality issues such as a nearby fire, Direct eXpansion (DX) cooling will be used. DX is a simpler means of mechanical cooling that is normally used for residential, automotive, or light commercial applications.

As a result of these measures the Dublin facility will use less than 1% of the water that traditional data center facilities typically use on an annual basis, and will improve Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) by approximately 50%.

These improvements are part of our continued corporate commitment to environmental sustainability. Microsoft is a proud participant and endorser of the European Union (EU) Code of Conduct for Data Centres, a voluntary program that encourages organizations responsible for the operations of data centers to utilize technologies, systems, and processes that maximize the efficient use of electricity. We are one of the largest online service providers to sign the EU’s Code of Conduct for Data Centres. Our participation includes a commitment to continuing to develop and employ innovative systems and processes that deliver computing scale to meet our evolving Software plus Services business initiatives with the lowest possible consumption of power and natural resources. We also work actively with The Green Grid and Climate Savers Computing industry consortiums and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to advance sustainability and reduce the carbon footprint of data centers globally.

On September 16 we were honored to be recognized as a Best Practice in the European Commission's Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign for innovative achievements in design and operational strategies that are driving greater sustainability and efficiency at the Dublin facility.

While our best practices are competitive advantages for Microsoft, we hope they will also help others in the industry make the cloud a safer and more reliable place that companies can trust for their operations. Very few companies can make the infrastructure investment that Microsoft has, so we think it is important to share our best practices with the industry. This is one of many reasons we decided to hold a grand opening of the facility today.

I’d like to close by noting how this week’s grand opening helps celebrate and build upon Microsoft’s long-term investment in operations in the Republic of Ireland. Microsoft Ireland is now nearing the 25-year anniversary mark, and I believe the building of the Dublin data center will long be remembered as a key milestone of our relationship with this community. The $500 million facility is one of the largest construction projects in Ireland over last 12 months and has generated approximately 1 million man-hours of work with a peak workforce of around 2,100 workers. The data center will also provide approximately 35-50 jobs in the Dublin area for years to come.

It is exciting to unveil this marvellous facility and I’d like to extend my thanks to all the people inside and outside Microsoft who helped make it happen.

Arne

Arne Josefsberg,

General Manager of Infrastructure Services

Global Foundation Services

Microsoft

Microsoft Brings Two More Mega Data Centers Online in July

msdcblog — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:55:00 GMT

I am really excited that our team is now reaching another key milestone in data center innovations. July marks the launch of our two newest mega data centers in Chicago and Dublin. Our Dublin facility will go live on July 1, followed by our Chicago facility on July 20 to support our growing Online, Live, and Cloud services.

Together these Generation 3 facilities demonstrate Microsoft’s continuing commitment to improving data center efficiency with a focus on environmental sustainability.

The Dublin, Ireland, data center is our first mega data center built outside of the United States. This building covers 303,000 square feet, with 5.4 mega watts of critical power available now. Over time, the data center can expand to a total of 22.2 mega watts of critical power, growing with our business and customer demand. The facility makes extensive use of outside air economization to cool the facility year round, resulting in greater power efficiency with a resultant reduction in carbon footprint.

Dublin Data Center

The Chicago, Illinois facility covers over 700,000 square feet—approximately the size of 16 football fields—with critical power of 60 megawatts. Phase 1 represents 30 mega watts of critical power and the rest is pre-positioned for future growth. Two-thirds of the Chicago data center is optimized for housing containerized servers. Containers conserve energy and will help us realize new advancements in power efficiency with a PUE yearly average calculated at 1.22. 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.

It is truly exciting to bring these two data centers online. We take great pride in the innovations they deliver to move the data center industry forward and to extend Microsoft’s online services to customers globally. As the company’s Software-plus-Services strategy progresses, these data centers will play a key supporting role.

I’d like to extend my congratulations and thanks to everyone at Microsoft who was involved in creating these state-of-the-art facilities and to all the local and regional trades people and organizations that helped make them possible. For more information on our cloud infrastructure strategy and services please visit our web site.

Arne

Arne Josefsberg,

General Manager of Infrastructure Services

Global Foundation Services

Microsoft’s Infrastructure Services Team Welcomes Kevin Timmons

msdcblog — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Building an organization around exceptional leaders with the deepest industry expertise is core to how we evolve our Global Foundation Services organization. One such leader is Kevin Timmons, who joined Microsoft Global Foundation Services (GFS) today to head up our Data Center Services organization. Kevin brings a wealth of knowledge and passion in this space, most recently serving as vice president of Operations at Yahoo!, where he led the build-out of their data centers and infrastructure. Before that he was a director of Operations at GeoCities, and prior to that he served as a senior software engineer at Marconi Dynamics.

Kevin is known as a hands-on leader with a great grasp on the issues in his field and a keen interest in increasing energy efficiency. One of the key ways he has approached that challenge was by closely measuring efficiency at each data center and using PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) as a key metric—a strategy that helped build more efficient data centers. Kevin also brings valuable experience and know-how in the field of data center site selection. Anyone familiar with our areas of focus in Microsoft data centers, especially around environmental sustainability, will recognize the great fit Kevin’s experiences bring to the team. In sitting down with him and exploring these areas in depth, I’ve become increasingly excited about the industry experience Kevin brings to our team.

In addition to bringing Kevin on board, we’ve recently restructured our Infrastructure Services team within GFS. In mid May we aligned the organization around five teams: Shared Infrastructure, Programmable Infrastructure, Platform Hardware and Standards, Global Network Services, and the Data Center Services team that Kevin now heads up. These changes will help us align our teams with Microsoft’s evolving cloud computing business and position our infrastructure for the upcoming year and beyond. We look forward to sharing more about these teams in upcoming postings.

Arne

Arne Josefsberg,

General Manager of Infrastructure Services

Global Foundation Services

Microsoft’s Top 10 Business Practices for Environmentally Sustainable Data Centers (celebrating Earth Day)

msdcblog — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:00:00 GMT

How to Reduce Energy Consumption, Waste, and Costs while Increasing Efficiency and ROI

What does environmental sustainability mean to data centers, industry operators, and IT businesses? A lot of managers in these areas may barely notice the Earth Day global event on April 22 as they struggle to support their businesses in the face of budget cuts and uncertainty about the future. But the fact is, being “lean and green” is good for both the business and the environment, and organizations that focus their attentions accordingly will see clear benefits. Reducing energy use and waste improves a company’s bottom line and boosting the use of recycled materials is a proven way to demonstrate good corporate citizenship to your customers, employees, and the communities you do business in.

That said, with so much on the plates of data center and IT professionals these days it isn’t always easy to know where to begin in moving to greener and more efficient operations. With that in mind—along with Microsoft’s commitment to share best practices with the rest of the data center industry—we asked some of the senior members our Global Foundation Services’ Infrastructure Services team to send us their top ten best business practices for environmentally sustainable data centers and IT.

Their favorite practices are reflected in our new “Microsoft’s Top 10 Business Practices for Environmentally Sustainable Data Centers” paper.

You can explore other data center resources on our GFS web site here.

Microsoft announced in March 2009 that it is taking a proactive corporate approach to reduce our carbon emissions per unit of revenue by at least 30 percent below 2007 levels by 2012. The data centers managed by GFS are a significant component of Microsoft’s carbon footprint, and our organization plays a vital role in Microsoft’s efforts to meet this corporate goal.

As you’ll read in the list of best practices we’ve compiled, companies can make major gains in energy efficiency by increasing server utilization and moving to virtualization, plus you can employ a wide range of smaller initiatives that collectively add up to significant gains. Microsoft has been using these practices for several years now and found that in addition to helping us protect the environment, they make best use of our resources and help us stay tightly aligned with our core strategies and goals. We hope they work for you as well.

Below is an overview of the best practices list.

1. Provide incentives that support your primary goals.

2. Focus on effective resource utilization.

3. Use virtualization to improve server utilization and increase operational efficiency.

4. Drive quality up through compliance.

5. Embrace change management.

6. Invest in understanding your application workload and behavior.

7. Right-size your server platforms to meet your application requirements.

8. Evaluate and test servers for performance, power, and total cost of ownership.

9. Converge on as small a number of stock-keeping units (SKUs) as you can.

10. Take advantage of competitive bids from multiple vendors to foster innovation and reduce costs.

Beyond the business practices listed above, Microsoft’s data center team is taking significant steps in four areas important to environmental sustainability:

· Using recycled resources whenever practical: The Microsoft data center in San Antonio, Texas, for example, uses approximately eight million gallons of recycled water a month from the city’s waste water system during peak cooling months.

· Using renewable resources whenever available: In the process we have developed for deciding where to build our data center facilities, renewable energy sources play a key role. For instance, the Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington, uses 100 percent renewable hydropower from the Columbia Basin River. The San Antonio facility obtains part of its electricity from wind power. And the company’s Dublin, Ireland, data center will use outside air for cooling, thus reducing the need for energy-intensive coolers.

· Reducing waste in operations: One example of Microsoft’s focus on reducing waste is the company’s transition to using standard shipping containers to house thousands of servers apiece. Ordering servers by the truckload eliminates the need for large amounts of packaging and other materials previously required when servers were delivered individually or in racks.

· Actively participating in industry environmental groups: Microsoft plays leadership roles in Climate Savers Computing Initiative and The Green Grid—industry organizations focused on improving computer systems and data center energy efficiency and establishing a standard methodology for measuring Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) accurately and consistently. We also feel it’s important for us to openly share information and best practices around data center energy efficiency, because we believe the data center industry needs to work together to make dramatic gains toward environmental sustainability.

The teams that contributed to this white paper are represented by our power and cooling architect Christian Belady, our distinguished engineer Dileep Bhandarkar, our Data Center Services director Daniel Costello (“the father” of our Generation 4 modular data center vision and the leader of the team of engineers that created it), our Data Center Software Services general manager Jawaid Ekram, and myself.

Their backgrounds include expertise in data center electrical and mechanical engineering, power and cooling architecture and design, research and development, and business operations and administration. It has been my distinct pleasure to work with and lead these subject matter experts and to share their thoughts with the industry via our blogs and participation in industry events.

Arne

Arne Josefsberg,

General Manager of Infrastructure Services

Global Foundation Services

Changes at Microsoft

msdcblog — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:08:00 GMT

by Arne Josefsberg

As you may have already read, Mike Manos will be leaving Microsoft in early May to return to Chicago and take a leadership position with Digital Realty Trust. Those of you who read this blog regularly, or who followed his Loose Bolts blog, know that Mike’s been an integral leader in our data center organization. I feel privileged to have had Mike as part of my Infrastructure Services leadership team -- he’s done an outstanding job delivering on our data center strategy, encouraging cross-industry information sharing, and was instrumental in helping us build a world-class data center team.

I want to publicly thank Mike for his excellent work and wish him the best in his new position. All of us here are going to miss his enthusiasm and passion. And, I'm fortunate to have the fantastic data center team he helped build here to continue driving data center innovation and delivering on our Generation 4 data centers and beyond. There is so much more we want to do to take cloud infrastructure, including data centers, to the next level.

I’m sure we’ll continue to see great things from Mike in the data center industry. And he's got one more post in mind for this blog, you'll see that sometime next week.

Building a Better Mousetrap a.k.a. Optimizing for Maximum Efficiency in an Economic Downturn

msdcblog — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:31:00 GMT

By Arne Josefsberg and Mike Manos, January 23, 2009

As you might have read in Microsoft’s Q2 FY09 earnings release yesterday, the company has announced cost management initiatives due to the global economic downturn. And with the earnings release back in October, Microsoft announced a reduction of projected capital expenditures by $300 million to our data centers. You might be thinking that the data center team is pulling our hair out trying to figure out how to meet our goals given the new constraints. After all, we need to continue supporting a growing base of more than 400 million Hotmail users and over a billion Live Search queries each day, plus 250 other services for Microsoft, including a fast-growing online services business for enterprise companies and the new Azure platform that software developers are beginning to use to create new services.

But we’ve been preparing for lean times for a while. This recession is the ideal backdrop to implement small changes that target big needs. Frugality drives innovation, and limited resources are just another forcing function to develop creative solutions to infrastructure needs. For our industry, this means more reasons to identify the small tweaks to products or operational approaches that can unlock big opportunities.

If you’ve been reading our blogs, you know that a major focus of our team (for a couple of years now) has been on smart growth and making gains in power optimization, server utilization, and efficiencies that will enable us to do more with less. And we have been a proponent of the industry, as a whole, to start measuring PUE in their data center facilities. This provides a great foundation on how to manage and view your operations.

We measure everything in our data center operations to the point of obsession, and continually analyze our measurements to identify areas where we can improve efficiency and increase ROI. Of course we’re doubling down on those efforts in light of the new budgets constraints, but we’ve already been moving in that direction for quite some time. A big part of our efficiency efforts involve increasing the utilization of our servers—an area where our industry is now beginning to raise the bar. We’re working on a multitude of fronts in this area and we are making real progress. One way is through virtualization, where we’re beginning to run multiple service tasks on the same machine. Another is by working closely with our internal customers, providing them real-time data about their utilization to help them identify extra capacity they already have so they don’t need to order more servers. And our research and engineering teams have developed some interesting and innovative approaches to increasing power densities that help us get more capacity out of our existing resources.

Thanks to the efficiencies we’ve gained through these ongoing efforts, we will be able to delay the construction and opening of some of our facilities, which will save Microsoft and its shareholders significant operating expenses, going a long way towards meeting the goals that Microsoft announced this week. For instance we’re postponing construction of the data center in Iowa that we recently purchased land for. We are still continuing construction of our facilities in Chicago and Dublin, and are planning to open them as customer demand warrants. But given the current economic climate we’re going to do the right thing for our business and shareholders and revisit our plans on a quarter-by-quarter basis. On other fronts, we are expanding existing capacity and making improvements for our other co-location facilities, like Amsterdam, that strengthen our global footprint and help us meet growing demand for online services for businesses.

The bottom line is that despite the problems the economy is going through, our online services businesses are growing. We expect that more companies will turn to our services to save money – by allowing them to decrease overhead costs – and that software developers will increasingly use the flexibility and low cost of entry of our new Azure platform.

We have been busy “building a better mouse trap” for these type of scenarios and are now turning up the dial on our efficiency efforts. Thanks to a lot of hard work and innovation by our team in recent years, we are prepared to address market changes – without requiring Microsoft to skip a beat in moving its Online, Cloud, and Live service businesses forward.

Be sure to visit our team blog next week when Christian Belady, our power and cooling architect, will be sharing more information on our efficiency best practices.

aj/mm

Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure services, Global Foundation Services, Microsoft
Michael Manos, general manager of data centers, Global Foundation Services, Microsoft