ms datacenters : Dublin

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)

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

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

DataCenter Think Tanks Sheepish on Weightloss

msdcblog — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:15:00 GMT

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

Matt Stansbury over at Data Center Facilities Pro posted an interesting post regarding a panel containing Uptime’s Ken Brill. The note warns folks on the use of PUE as a benchmarking standard between data centers.

I can’t say I really disagree with what he says. In my mind, self measurement is always an intensely personal thing. To me, PUE is a great self-measurement tool to drive towards power efficiency in your data center. Do you include lighting? Do you include your mechanical systems? To me those questions are not all that dissimilar to the statement, “I am losing weight”. Are you weighing yourself nude? in the your underwear? with your shoes on?

I do think the overall PUE metric could go a little farther to fully define what *MUST* be in the calculation, especially if you are going to use it comparatively. But those who want to use this metric in some kind of competitive game are completely missing the point. This is ultimately about using the power resources you have to its highest possible efficiency. As I have stated over and over, and as recently as the recent Data Center Dynamics conference in Seattle. Every Data Center is different. If I tried to compare the efficiency of one of our latest generation facilities in San Antonio or Dublin to a facility built 10 years ago, assuming we made sure that we were comparing apples to apples with like systems included, of course the latest generation facilities would be better off. A loss of 5 pounds on an Olympic runner with 4% body fat compared to a loss of 5 pounds on professional sumo wrestler have dramatically different effects (or non effects).

Everyone knows I am a proponent of PUE/DCiE. So when you read this understand where my baggage is carried. To me the use of either, or, or both of these is a matter of audience. Engineers love efficiency. Business Managers understand overhead. Regardless the measurement is consistent and more importantly the measurement is happening with some regularity. This is more important than anything.

If we are going to attempt to use PUE for full scale facility comparison a couple of things have to happen. At Microsoft we measure PUE aggressively and often. This speaks to the time element that Ken mentions in his talk in the post. It would be great for the Green Grid or Uptime or anyone to produce the “Imperial Standard”. One could even think that these groups could earn some extra revenue by certifying facilities to the “Imperial PUE standard”. This would include minimum measurement cylces (once a day, twice a day, average for a year, peak for a year, etc). Heavens knows it would be a far more useful metric for measuring data centers than the current LEEDS certifications. But thats another post for another time. Seriously, the time element is hugely important. Measuring your data center once at midnight in January while experiencing the coldest winter on record might make great marketing, but it doesnt mean much.

As an industry we have to face the fact that there are morons amongst us. This, of course is made worse if people are trying to advertise PUE as a competitive advantage due mostly to the fact that this means that they have engaged marketing people to “enhance” the message. Ken’s mention of someone announcing that their PUE of .8 should instantly flag that person as an idiot and you should hand them an Engvallian sign. But even barring these easy to identify examples we must remember that any measurement can be gamed. In fact, I would go so far as to say that gaming measurements is the national pastime of all businesses.

Ultimately I just chalk this up to another element of “Green-washing” that our industry is floating in.

Ken also talks about the use of the word “Power” being incorrect and that because it is a point in time measurement versus an over time measurement and that we should be focused on “Energy”. According to Ken this could ultimately doom the measurement on the whole. I think this is missing the point entirely on two fronts. First whether you call it power or energy, the naming semantics dont really matter. They matter to english professors and people writing white papers, but it terms of actually doing something, it has no effect. The simple act of measuring is the most critical concept here. Measure something, get better. Whether you like PUE, DCIE or whether you want to adopt “Energy” and call it EUE and embrace a picture of a sheep with power monitoring apparatus attached to its back, the name doesnt really matter. )Though I must admit, a snappy mascot might actually drive more people to measure. Just do something!

My informal polling at speaking engagements continues on the state of the industry and I am sad to say, the amount of people actively measuring power consumption remains less than 10% (let alone measuring for efficiency!), and if anything the number seems to be declining.

In my mind, as an end-user, the thrash that we see coming from the standards bodies and think tank organizations like Uptime, Green Grid, and others should really stop bickering over whose method of calculation is better or has the best name. We have enough challenge getting the industry to adopt ANY KIND of measurement. To confuse matters more and argue the finer points of absurdity is only going to further magnify this thrash and ensure we continue to confuse most data center operators into more non-action . As an industry we are heading down a path with our gun squarely aimed at out foot. If we are not careful, the resultant wound is going to end up in amputation.

- MM