ms datacenters : Cloud Computing

Presenting our Datacentre Strategy at Tech-Ed EMEA

msdcblog — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:41:00 GMT

Just a short post to let you know that I’ll be in Berlin for Tech-Ed EMEA from November 9 - 13 and I hope to see some of you there. I’ll be providing deeper insight into our new Dublin and Chicago datacentres, including our approaches to delivering on the scale and efficiency required to meet the capacity to support Microsoft’s global Software+Services and cloud computing business objectives.

I’ll be delivering two sessions:

· ITS207 – Microsoft Data Centres: From Buildings to Building Blocks

o In this session I’ll be providing the audience with a virtual tour of our new datacentres in Chicago and Dublin, exposing the evolution from traditional colocations to our Generation 3 mega-data-centres. I’ll talk about the design goals of these two facilities and will provide some insight into our upcoming Generation 4 modular datacentres, and our mission to deliver breakthroughs in flexible, highly efficient scale.

· MGT19-IS – Microsoft’s Mission for Efficient Datacentres

o This session will focus on the broader aspects of Microsoft’s efforts to improve the efficiency of our datacentres across the globe, as well as pointers to resources and tools that any datacentre operator or IT manager can take advantage of. Additionally, I’ll invite the audience to share their own ideas, questions and experiences in managing the capacity, scale and efficiency of their datacentre capacity. I’m really looking forward to this discussion.

More information on Tech-Ed EMEA can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/europe/teched/ Tech-Ed is a good venue for any and all technology professionals interested in exploring a broad set of current and upcoming Microsoft technologies, tools, platforms, and services.

Whether you can make it to these sessions or not, I’m looking forward to seeing you in Berlin. Feel free to tap me on the shoulder and say hello.

Catch you again shortly,

John Dwyer,

International Data Centre Manager

Global Foundation Services, Microsoft

Rolling out the Green Carpet for Dublin’s Neighbors

msdcblog — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:01:00 GMT

A few weeks back we had the privilege of hosting a data centre visit and tour for the residential neighbours of the Dublin data centre. Given the long projected lifespan of our new facility, we’re going to be neighbours for a long time, and so we felt...(read more)

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

How Microsoft is Securing the Cloud Infrastructure and Our Data Centers, Part 2

msdcblog — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:57:00 GMT

The release last week of our white paper on Securing Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure generated a lot of discussion in the industry, which was our intent. We wrote the paper in part to communicate our practices to customers concerned about security in the cloud environment and to generate a healthy dialogue within the industry in order to share best practices for creating more secure cloud-based services.

Pete Boden, general manager of our Online Services Security team, posted a blog today providing more detail in response to questions we've gotten since we released the paper. Give it a read to learn more about Microsoft's history in online services and security, and how that history led to our Information Security Program that has been independently certified by British Standards Institute (BSI) Management Systems America as being compliant with ISO/IEC 27001:2005.

How Microsoft is Securing the Cloud Infrastructure and Our Data Centers

msdcblog — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:45:00 GMT

Companies considering moving their IT operations to the cloud are understandably concerned about security, privacy, reliability, and operational controls. To address these concerns and help share best practices with the rest of the industry, the Online Services Security and Compliance (OSSC) team within the Global Foundation Services group that supports Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure has published a white paper titled: Securing Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure

Our Online Services Security team is led by Charlie McNerney, GM, Business & Risk Management, who has posted a blog today describing how our coordinated and strategic application of people, processes, technologies, and experience with consumer and enterprise security has resulted in continuous improvements to the security practices and policies of the Microsoft cloud infrastructure.

And you can find more information on our strategic vision for Microsoft’s infrastructure at our Global Foundation Services web site.

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

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

Microsoft's Generation 4 Data Center Vision - the Architects' Perspective

msdcblog — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:44:00 GMT

Microsoft's Generation 4 Data Center Vision - the Architects' Perspective

By David Gauthier, Data Center Infrastructure Architect and Christian Belady, Principal Power and Cooling Architect, Microsoft Corp.

On Tuesday, December 2, our Global Foundation Services team went public with our Generation 4 Modular Data Center Vision and over the past week a lot of great discussions and questions have been posed from our industry colleagues. Today, we wanted to address some of those questions and share more insight on our Gen 4 plan via a video interview we did with Adam Bomb, a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft's TechNet Edge.

Some people got the impression that this announcement was solely about a containerized server room rather than a re-thinking of the entire infrastructure. The goal of Gen 4 is to modularize not only the server and storage components, which a number of companies are already doing, but also to modularize the infrastructure, namely the electrical and mechanical systems. The real innovation is around the commonality, manufacturing, supply chain and integration of these modules to provide a plug-and-play infrastructure along with modularized server environments. In addition, it is focused on scaling the infrastructure with the business demands, smoothing capital investment, and driving costs down as shown by the following chart.

While we expect these modular innovations to reduce capital investments by 20%-40% or more depending on class, we also expect considerable reductions in operating expenses related to electricity and water consumption. Designing from the start for environmental sustainability has allowed us to focus on using less construction material up front, less energy and water during operation, and also allows us to recycle and reuse components at the end of their useful life. No longer will we be governed by the initial decisions made when constructing the facility. We will have almost unlimited use and re-use of the facility and site. We will also be able to use power in an ultra-fluid fashion moving load from critical to non-critical as use and capacity requirements dictate.

More importantly, any IT or infrastructure vendor's products that meet our specs can be used interchangeably, thus providing a means for global sourcing and a competitive and innovative supplier landscape. As our team has already discussed pretty thoroughly, Microsoft is already reaping some of the benefits of modularity with server containers and we are confident that further modularization will afford us additional benefits when applied to the 'back of house'.

Some people have questioned whether an open air facility is as safe against natural disasters as a traditional concrete and steel structure. We believe that it can be and we are currently taking these factors into account as part of our heat map criteria site selection activities. Of course, we also expect that our modular approach affords tremendous flexibility in addressing site specific conditions as needed. Another significant benefit modularity offers is a smaller system failure zone versus a traditional data center. For example, a fire in a data center could bring the whole facility down in traditional construction (or have the fire department activate the emergency power off). Alternatively, in a modularized data center the fire could actually be isolated to only a subset of modules and thus provide greater resiliency.

We recognize that these types of architectures may not work for every application or every data center provider out there. We're not saying this will be the right way or the wrong way, just our way - and it may not be for everyone. We are confident about this direction meeting the needs of our data center environment and we hope that it sets the stage for continued healthy and dynamic dialog and sharing in this industry.

For more background information on our modular data center vision, please visit the December 2^nd blog of "Our Vision for Generation 4 Modular Data Centers - One way of getting it just right...," as well as the Gen 4 video posted at Soapbox.

cb/dg

Our Vision for Generation 4 Modular Data Centers – One way of Getting it just right . . .

msdcblog — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:13:00 GMT

The following posting originally appeared on Michael Manos' Loose Bolts blog.

Data Centers are a hot topic these days. No matter where you look, this once obscure aspect of infrastructure is getting a lot of attention. For years, there have been cost pressures on IT operations and this, when the need for modern capacity is greater than ever, has thrust data centers into the spotlight. Server and rack density continues to rise, placing DC professionals and businesses in tighter and tougher situations while they struggle to manage their IT environments. And now hyper-scale cloud infrastructure is taking traditional technologies to limits never explored before and focusing the imagination of the IT industry on new possibilities.

At Microsoft, we have focused a lot of thought and research around how to best operate and maintain our global infrastructure and we want to share those learnings. While obviously there are some aspects that we keep to ourselves, we have shared how we operate facilities daily, our technologies and methodologies, and, most importantly, how we monitor and manage our facilities. Whether it’s speaking at industry events, inviting customers to our “Microsoft data center conferences” held in our data centers, or through other media like blogging and white papers, we believe sharing best practices is paramount and will drive the industry forward. So in that vein, we have some interesting news to share.

Today we are sharing our Generation 4 Modular Data Center plan. This is our vision and will be the foundation of our cloud data center infrastructure in the next five years. We believe it is one of the most revolutionary changes to happen to data centers in the last 30 years. Joining me, in writing this blog are Daniel Costello, my director of Data Center Research and Engineering and Christian Belady, principal power and cooling architect. I feel their voices will add significant value to driving understanding around the many benefits included in this new design paradigm.

Our “Gen 4” modular data centers will take the flexibility of containerized servers—like those in our Chicago data center—and apply it across the entire facility. So what do we mean by modular? Think of it like “building blocks”, where the data center will be composed of modular units of prefabricated mechanical, electrical, security components, etc., in addition to containerized servers.

Was there a key driver for the Generation 4 Data Center?

If we were to summarize the promise of our Gen 4 design into a single sentence it would be something like this: “A highly modular, scalable, efficient, just-in-time data center capacity program that can be delivered anywhere in the world very quickly and cheaply, while allowing for continued growth as required.” Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, keep in mind that these concepts have been in initial development and prototyping for over a year and are based on cumulative knowledge of previous facility generations and the advances we have made since we began our investments in earnest on this new design.

One of the biggest challenges we’ve had at Microsoft is something Mike likes to call the ‘Goldilock’s Problem’. In a nutshell, the problem can be stated as:

The worst thing we can do in delivering facilities for the business is not have enough capacity online, thus limiting the growth of our products and services.

The second worst thing we can do in delivering facilities for the business is to have too much capacity online.

This has led to a focus on smart, intelligent growth for the business — refining our overall demand picture. It can’t be too hot. It can’t be too cold. It has to be ‘Just Right!’ The capital dollars of investment are too large to make without long term planning. As we struggled to master these interesting challenges, we had to ensure that our technological plan also included solutions for the business and operational challenges we faced as well.

So let’s take a high level look at our Generation 4 design

Are you ready for some great visuals? Click here for the Microsoft 4th Gen Video. It’s a concept video that came out of my Data Center Research and Engineering team, under Daniel Costello, that will give you a view into what we think is the future.

From a configuration, construct-ability and time to market perspective, our primary goals and objectives are to modularize the whole data center. Not just the server side (like the Chicago facility), but the mechanical and electrical space as well. This means using the same kind of parts in pre-manufactured modules, the ability to use containers, skids, or rack-based deployments and the ability to tailor the Redundancy and Reliability requirements to the application at a very specific level.

Our goals from a cost perspective were simple in concept but tough to deliver. First and foremost, we had to reduce the capital cost per critical Mega Watt by the class of use. Some applications can run with N-level redundancy in the infrastructure, others require a little more infrastructure for support. These different classes of infrastructure requirements meant that optimizing for all cost classes was paramount. At Microsoft, we are not a one trick pony and have many Online products and services (240+) that require different levels of operational support. We understand that and ensured that we addressed it in our design which will allow us to reduce capital costs by 20%-40% or greater depending upon class.

For example, non-critical or geo redundant applications have low hardware reliability requirements on a location basis. As a result, Gen 4 can be configured to provide stripped down, low-cost infrastructure with little or no redundancy and/or temperature control. Let’s say an Online service team decides that due to the dramatically lower cost, they will simply use uncontrolled outside air with temperatures ranging 10-35 C and 20-80% RH. The reality is we are already spec-ing this for all of our servers today and working with server vendors to broaden that range even further as Gen 4 becomes a reality. For this class of infrastructure, we eliminate generators, chillers, UPSs, and possibly lower costs relative to traditional infrastructure.

Applications that demand higher level of redundancy or temperature control will use configurations of Gen 4 to meet those needs, however, they will also cost more (but still less than traditional data centers). We see this cost difference driving engineering behavioral change in that we predict more applications will drive towards Geo redundancy to lower costs.

Another cool thing about Gen 4 is that it allows us to deploy capacity when our demand dictates it. Once finalized, we will no longer need to make large upfront investments. Imagine driving capital costs more closely in-line with actual demand, thus greatly reducing time-to-market and adding the capacity Online inherent in the design. Also reduced is the amount of construction labor required to put these “building blocks” together. Since the entire platform requires pre-manufacture of its core components, on-site construction costs are lowered. This allows us to maximize our return on invested capital.

In our design process, we questioned everything. You may notice there is no roof and some might be uncomfortable with this. We explored the need of one and throughout our research we got some surprising (positive) results that showed one wasn’t needed.

In short, we are striving to bring Henry Ford’s Model T factory to the data center. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#Model_T. Gen 4 will move data centers from a custom design and build model to a commoditized manufacturing approach. We intend to have our components built in factories and then assemble them in one location (the data center site) very quickly. Think about how a computer, car or plane is built today. Components are manufactured by different companies all over the world to a predefined spec and then integrated in one location based on demands and feature requirements. And just like Henry Ford’s assembly line drove the cost of building and the time-to-market down dramatically for the automobile industry, we expect Gen 4 to do the same for data centers. Everything will be pre-manufactured and assembled on the pad.

And did we mention that this platform will be, overall, incredibly energy efficient? From a total energy perspective not only will we have remarkable PUE values, but the total cost of energy going into the facility will be greatly reduced as well. How much energy goes into making concrete? Will we need as much of it? How much energy goes into the fuel of the construction vehicles? This will also be greatly reduced! A key driver is our goal to achieve an average PUE at or below 1.125 by 2012 across our data centers. More than that, we are on a mission to reduce the overall amount of copper and water used in these facilities. We believe these will be the next areas of industry attention when and if the energy problem is solved. So we are asking today…“how can we build a data center with less building”?

We have talked openly and publicly about building chiller-less data centers and running our facilities using aggressive outside economization. Our sincerest hope is that Gen 4 will completely eliminate the use of water. Today’s data centers use massive amounts of water and we see water as the next scarce resource and have decided to take a proactive stance on making water conservation part of our plan.

By sharing this with the industry, we believe everyone can benefit from our methodology. While this concept and approach may be intimidating (or downright frightening) to some in the industry, disclosure ultimately is better for all of us.

Gen 4 design (even more than just containers), could reduce the ‘religious’ debates in our industry. With the central spine infrastructure in place, containers or pre-manufactured server halls can be either AC or DC, air-side economized or water-side economized, or not economized at all (though the sanity of that might be questioned). Gen 4 will allow us to decommission, repair and upgrade quickly because everything is modular. No longer will we be governed by the initial decisions made when constructing the facility. We will have almost unlimited use and re-use of the facility and site. We will also be able to use power in an ultra-fluid fashion moving load from critical to non-critical as use and capacity requirements dictate.

Finally, we believe this is a big game changer. Gen 4 will provide a standard platform that our industry can innovate around. For example, all modules in our Gen 4 will have common interfaces clearly defined by our specs and any vendor that meets these specifications will be able to plug into our infrastructure. Whether you are a computer vendor, UPS vendor, generator vendor, etc., you will be able to plug and play into our infrastructure. This means we can also source anyone, anywhere on the globe to minimize costs and maximize performance. We want to help motivate the industry to further innovate—with innovations from which everyone can reap the benefits.

To summarize, the key characteristics of our Generation 4 data centers are:

Scalable
Plug-and-play spine infrastructure
Factory pre-assembled: Pre-Assembled Containers (PACs) & Pre-Manufactured Buildings (PMBs)
Rapid deployment
De-mountable
Reduce TTM
Reduced construction
Sustainable measures
Map applications to DC Class

We hope you join us on this incredible journey of change and innovation!

Long hours of research and engineering time are invested into this process. There are still some long days and nights ahead, but the vision is clear. Rest assured however, that we as refine Generation 4, the team will soon be looking to Generation 5 (even if it is a bit farther out). There is always room to get better.

So if you happen to come across Goldilocks in the forest, and you are curious as to why she is smiling you will know that she feels very good about getting very close to ‘JUST RIGHT’.

Generations of Evolution – some background on our data center designs

We thought you might be interested in understanding what happened in the first three generations of our data center designs. When Ray Ozzie wrote his Software plus Services memo it posed a very interesting challenge to us. The winds of change were at ‘tornado’ proportions. That “plus Services” tag had some significant (and unstated) challenges inherent to it. The first was that Microsoft was going to evolve even further into an operations company. While we had been running large scale Internet services since 1995, this development lead us to an entirely new level. Additionally, these “services” would span across both Internet and Enterprise businesses. To those of you who have to operate “stuff”, you know that these are two very different worlds in operational models and challenges. It also meant that, to achieve the same level of reliability and performance required our infrastructure was going to have to scale globally and in a significant way.

It was that intense atmosphere of change that we first started re-evaluating data center technology and processes in general and our ideas began to reach farther than what was accepted by the industry at large. This was the era of Generation 1. As we look at where most of the world’s data centers are today (and where our facilities were), it represented all the known learning and design requirements that had been in place since IBM built the first purpose-built computer room. These facilities focused more around uptime, reliability and redundancy. Big infrastructure was held accountable to solve all potential environmental shortfalls. This is where the majority of infrastructure in the industry still is today.

We soon realized that traditional data centers were quickly becoming outdated. They were not keeping up with the demands of what was happening technologically and environmentally. That’s when we kicked off our Generation 2 design. Gen 2 facilities started taking into account sustainability, energy efficiency, and really looking at the total cost of energy and operations. No longer did we view data centers just for the upfront capital costs, but we took a hard look at the facility over the course of its life. Our Quincy, Washington and San Antonio, Texas facilities are examples of our Gen 2 data centers where we explored and implemented new ways to lessen the impact on the environment. These facilities are considered two leading industry examples, based on their energy efficiency and ability to run and operate at new levels of scale and performance by leveraging clean hydro power (Quincy) and recycled waste water (San Antonio) to cool the facility during peak cooling months.

As we were delivering our Gen 2 facilities into steel and concrete, our Generation 3 facilities were rapidly driving the evolution of the program. The key concepts for our Gen 3 design are increased modularity and greater concentration around energy efficiency and scale. The Gen 3 facility will be best represented by the Chicago, Illinois facility currently under construction. This facility will seem very foreign compared to the traditional data center concepts most of the industry is comfortable with. In fact, if you ever sit around in our container hanger in Chicago it will look incredibly different from a traditional raised-floor data center. We anticipate this modularization will drive huge efficiencies in terms of cost and operations for our business. We will also introduce significant changes in the environmental systems used to run our facilities. These concepts and processes (where applicable) will help us gain even greater efficiencies in our existing footprint, allowing us to further maximize infrastructure investments.

This is definitely a journey, not a destination industry. In fact, our Generation 4 design has been under heavy engineering for viability and cost for over a year. While the demand of our commercial growth required us to make investments as we grew, we treated each step in the learning as a process for further innovation in data centers. The design for our future Gen 4 facilities enabled us to make visionary advances that addressed the challenges of building, running, and operating facilities all in one concerted effort.

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