ms datacenters : gfs

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)

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.

Designing Generation 4.0 Data Centers: The Engineers’ Approach to Solving Business Challenges…continued

msdcblog — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:01:00 GMT

Part # 2

(A couple of years ago, when our Data Center Services’ Research & Engineering team within Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS) group kicked off the Generation 4.0 Data Center design project, we began with the question of: What are the primary business challenges facing data center deployments today? ) Here’s the rest of the story….

Question Everything

Often the application of technology involves as much innovation as the technology itself. Rather than reinvent the wheel we looked at our industry’s journey thus far. We started by questioning everything up to and including the roof and the very definition of a data center. With a lot of prior art in modularization, some of which has already been applied to the IT industry, we saw a good fit. The military has been deploying portable ground stations with IT servers and communications equipment for decades. And for some time now telecom companies have deployed pre-manufactured buildings which are then assembled on site as central offices.

As part of our design project we met to discuss the modular solution space with a group of folks from our Infrastructure Services team within GFS , including members of our hardware, data center operations, development, engineering, risk management, and security teams, as well as our internal product groups. (The original Gen 4.0 team from the two-day session is 100 percent intact and still working at Microsoft, by the way.) We knew we could modularize the server room, which we now call Server PACs. The challenge became how to modularize the entire facility. So we created other PACs: Generator PACS, Medium Voltage Switchgear PACs, UPS PACs, etc. Next, we developed the system electrical one-line diagrams and mechanical schematics for our four data center classes.

Then we had to take these single lines and schematics and break them into logical modules for the components to reside in. This may seem easy but represents a shift in thinking from a building where, for instance, we would have a UPS room and associated equipment and switchgear manufactured by multiple vendors and put it physically in sometimes separate modules. The challenge became how to shift from a traditional construction mindset to the new, modularized manufacturing mindset. Maintainability is a large part of reliability in a facility, and became a key differentiator between the four classes. Our A Class infrastructure, which is not concurrently maintainable and is on basically street power and unconditioned air, will require scheduled downtime for maintenance. The cost, efficiency, and time-to-market targets for A Class are very aggressive and a fraction of what the industry has come to see as normal today. We realized that standardization and reuse of components from one class to the next was a key to improving cost and efficiency. Our premise was that the same kit of parts (or modules) should be usable from class to class. These modules (in this new mindset) can be added to other modules to transition within the data center from one class to the next.

Standardize to Differentiate

With the standardization of a kit of modular parts it is possible to supply different types of facilities—large-scale, mega-data centers and edge or mini-data centers—from the same supply chain. A pre-manufactured set of solutions can thus reduce costs through economy of scale. Traditionally, because of network and site service costs it has been more cost effective to deploy 40 megawatts of capacity in a single location than to build 40 individual 1-megawatt facilities. In a pre-manufactured model that isn’t necessarily the case. The use of a production-line approach, while at the same time simplifying interconnections through the right modularization of the components, can drive costs down for mini- as well as mega-data center facilities. Of course the fixed costs of site development must be considered, but we are finding that the production-line approach is significantly narrowing the difference in cost per megawatt for mega- and mini-data centers.

We realize that innovation will come from many sources, and so we are partnering with technology leaders in the vendor community, as well as our customers, to help drive and deliver the benefits of this new approach. We believe it is crucially important to develop this technology now due to the many constraints on our environment and economy globally. However, we do not have unlimited resources to drive this alone. Through industry partnership and collaboration we will be able to accelerate the adoption of modular data centers and deliver the benefits of technology, software, and services to more people.

Imagine the possibilities of bringing affordable computing to corners of the world that have no power or IT grid to speak of today. This could be done using modular power plants such as fuel cells and modular data centers in partnership with wireless technology where there is a lack of existing infrastructure (for example). Applications could become virtual in the local modular data center, or the cloud, and the thousands of services and applications it holds could be provided via low-cost devices. Great opportunities like being able to provide a $100 or a lot less laptop (or new access devices not yet invented) per child could then be achieved sooner. A modular data center could quickly be deployed to support millions of virtual applications and at the same time access the power of the Internet and cloud services for a large population that does not have that opportunity today. Personally, I am very excited about these possibilities and believe I am fortunate to be working on this technology at this time.

We look forward to continued collaboration with our industry participants.

You can read part 1 of this 2 part series in my earlier blog on April 29, 2009

/dc

Daniel Costello, director of Data Center Services

Global Foundation Services

Daniel Costello is the director for Data Center Services at Microsoft, responsible for data center research and engineering, standards and technologies, data center technology roadmap, Generation 4 data center engineering, data center automation and integration with IT hardware, operating systems and applications. Daniel works closely with Microsoft Research on proof of concepts in support of the data center of the future and manages a team of facility engineers and service architects.

Designing Generation 4.0 Data Centers: The Engineers’ Approach to Solving Business Challenges

msdcblog — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:00:00 GMT

Part 1:

A couple of years ago, when our Data Center Services’ Research & Engineering team within Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS) group kicked off the Generation 4.0 Data Center design project, we began with the question of: What are the primary business challenges facing data center deployments today?

Challenge #1: Time to Market

We kept coming back to a couple of leading issues. The first focused on time to market and meeting a variable demand profile. The issue is simple: it takes months to years to build data centers, but sometimes businesses need to move faster.

This issue isn’t entirely new, of course. When we designed our Chicago facility we made significant gains in this area by devoting more than half the facility to housing containers that served as modularized server rooms, or Pre-Assembled Components (PACs). Server PACs dramatically reduce time to market because they are assembled at the same time as the site infrastructure and building for the data center. When the site preparation is complete all we have to do is roll the containers into the new facility, connect a few cables, and we’re up and running.

This advance was the heart of our Generation 3 data center. While we saw it as a great step forward, it almost immediately led us to ask ourselves whether we could take the gains even further by modularizing the entire facility. That led us to the crux of Generation 4, where we created further PACs: Generator PACS, Medium Voltage Switchgear PACs, UPS PACs, etc. By moving to PACs for all these key data center systems, we created a design where almost everything we need to add new capacity can be pre-assembled in parallel and then brought together in a matter of weeks. The fact that the components all come in their own modular containers eliminated the need for much of the on-site construction—which can be the most time-consuming, expensive, and environmentally unfriendly element of building a data center.

Perhaps most importantly, with Generation 4 we can quickly add capacity incrementally in response to demand. Gone are the days when we had to wait 12-18 months for a large data center to be built, only to use a small portion of its capacity while we waited for demand to catch up to capacity. In short, our Generation 4 design delivers a revolution in terms of time to market that the data center industry has never seen before.

Challenge #2: Cost

The next business challenge (after time to market) is cost. We looked at several areas impacting cost, capital efficiency, and return on invested capital (ROIC), which affects cash flow and is calculated using Net Present Value (NPV). Capital outlay itself is now widely measured by our industry in dollar value ($) per watt, versus square foot.

Operational costs that impact Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) are measured in $ per kilowatt per month and are impacted largely by depreciation, energy costs, and operations staffing. A couple of years ago we moved to a chargeback model for power versus real estate, and as Christian Belady pointed out in his blog, that incentive-based approach proved effective in turning the corner on power usage and costs.

To tackle other costs in the data center, the use of server PACs is proving equally effective. Using this approach we project our Chicago facility will deliver cost savings of approximately 30 percent and enable a more efficient cash flow because we will not build out the modularized server PACS until they are required. That’s just the beginning of the cost benefits as we move to Generation 4 and fully modularize the data center. The traditional raised floor is not where the majority of the money or lead time is spent. Instead, it is in the electrical and mechanical systems. Moving to PACs in these areas will reduce costs and free large amounts of capital previously required to construct huge facilities that we might not fully utilize for several years.

Challenge #3: Efficiency

The discussion on the impact of energy costs led us to the next business challenge: efficiency. Efficiency has been called the “fifth fuel” and is regarded as a source of energy in itself. Today the industry is beginning to use Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) as the recognized metric for data center efficiency. If we take a look at the larger picture beyond just operational power consumption, the Total Cost of Energy (TCOE) also needs to be considered to address the full lifecycle of the data center–from component manufacturer to transportation to construction and on-site assembly, and even end of life.

When we considered the goal of making our data centers more energy efficient, our team’s debate focused on the inefficiency of using redundant hardware systems to provide backup and failover capabilities. Previously many data centers have been built with the same level of reliability to the highest common denominator. Our Generation 4 team no longer believes that hardware redundancy is the best way to ensure service reliability. Therefore, we began with a fresh approach to this industry problem by looking at the latest technology capabilities and then establishing multiple classes of service. Each class was assigned a differentiated chargeback model that would encourage our properties to move to the lowest cost and most efficient service level that meets their business needs. To support this we are developing software that moves reliability across all applications higher up the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model all the way to the operating system and application layer. The four classes of data center service we have created are still being researched and we may consolidate them over time. Regardless, our goal around software-based reliability matched to hardware levels of reliability is driving the right discussions.

Challenge #4: Flexibility and Density

The last major challenge we identified was to enable data centers to be flexible and host multiple form factors and levels of density. With traditionally built facilities, the density of the data center is normally set during design. That density then remains unchanged for 15 years or longer during the facility’s lifecycle. Measured in watts per square foot, density can lead to capacity planning challenges. Build with too low a density and the data center will be less energy efficient and take up more real estate than is necessary, which can have a big impact when land is expensive. Build too high a density and you can strand power and cooling, which is where the majority of the costs are.

The Goals our Engineering Team Set

· Reduce time-to-market and deliver the facility at the same time as the computing infrastructure

· Reduce capital cost per megawatt and reduce COGS per kilowatt per month by class

· Increase ROIC and minimize the up-front investment for data centers

· Differentiate reliability and redundancy by data center class and design the system to be flexible to accommodate any class of service in the same facility

· Drive data center efficiency up while lowering PUE, water usage, and overall TCOE

· Develop a solution to accept multiple levels of density and form factors, such as racks, skids, or containers

Next week, I will talk about the process we used to develop these ideas.

/dc

Daniel Costello, director of Data Center Services

Global Foundation Services

Daniel Costello is the director for Data Center Services at Microsoft, responsible for data center research and engineering, standards and technologies, data center technology roadmap, Generation 4 data center engineering, data center automation and integration with IT hardware, operating systems and applications. Daniel also works closely with Microsoft Research on proof of concepts in support of the data center of the future and manages a team of facility engineers and service architects.

Interested in learning more about Green IT? Check out Microsoft’s Webcast Series on TechNet!

The series will feature a number of well known speakers, including Christian Belady and Daniel Costello. The full session listing is provided below:

The series will feature a number of well known speakers, including Christian Belady and Daniel Costello.

The full session listing is provided below:

Title	Date	Time (PST)	URL
Transforming the Data Center with Energy Efficiency (Level 200)	5/1/2009	11:00 AM	http://bit.ly/12CFzf
Hyper-Green Virtualization: Scaling Enterprise IT for Energy Efficiency (Level 200)	5/5/2009	10:00 AM	http://bit.ly/TFwxV
Cloud Computing Futures: Creating Greener Clouds with Microsoft Research (Level 200)	5/6/2009	9:00 AM	http://bit.ly/18hsgU
Improving Energy Efficiency w/ Windows 7 Power Management (Level 200)	5/8/2009	10:00 AM	http://bit.ly/fplU

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

Farmers, so long…

msdcblog — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:56:00 GMT

This post represents a bittersweet moment in my career. As you have no doubt heard I am moving on from Microsoft to take on an exciting senior role at Digital Realty Trust. I will save the specifics on my new role and its mission for a future post on my personal Loosebolts blog. But for now, I want to reflect a bit on my work here at Microsoft, our team, and a little bit on what it means to be a farmer.

A farmer you say? What the heck is he talking about? As I sit here writing this post my thoughts go back to one of many memorable moments here at the company. It’s a rainy, windy and biting cold day in April and a crowd of around 150 people are milling about the recently completed Microsoft data center facility in Quincy, Washington. The crowd is an odd mixture of city and state officials, Microsoft executives and facilities personnel, and key vendors from construction firms to operational support teams. Everyone is anxious for the ribbon-cutting ceremony to begin and I am mingling my way to the front of the crowd. Despite the weather there is a warmth and a glow as we have just completed Microsoft’s first mega-scale facility and the team is full of pride at the accomplishment.

I stopped for a moment to talk to one of the Port Commissioners in Quincy. Like me, he was originally from the Southside of Chicago and had the personal misfortune of attending my high school rival (old grudges die hard). This was the source of some fun for the two of us during the construction phase of the project and I took this time to chide him once more. This time, however, he looked fairly serious despite his grin and produced an oddly shaped bag which he thrust towards me.

The bag, he said, was a gift from Haricot farms, and was from the last harvest of beans from the field where our facility now stood. On the bag was the caption, "Preparing the site for another farmer, Microsoft."

This simple presentation hit me on quite a few levels. Of course there was the surface analogy of bean farms to server farms. But the gravity struck me that this was a significant transitional moment in time. This field, which had long been cultivated and yielded beans, onions, asparagus, and a host of other produce, was now being cultivated for its next crop, information and cloud computing. It was a crop unlike the region had ever seen before but it would certainly not be a single event. As the ribbon-cutting event began, this fact was driven home as a local city councilman remarked how he had gone to the post office and found himself amongst complete strangers. Times had certainly changed.

That bag of beans is in a place of great honor in our facility today.

As I think back on my career here at Microsoft, I am extremely proud of our team’s accomplishments. We have overcome obstacles, we have changed mindsets both internal and external, we have impacted the industry as a whole, and I believe we have been more successful than we dared ourselves to believe. Whether it was our early adoption of energy efficiency and water conservancy, our rabid dedication to measurement and monitoring, the tooling and automation developed to drive our environments further, or the professional rigor brought to operations both in facilities and in the support of the IT equipment. Our accomplishments are many and would be too numerous to list. As with all such accomplishments it is always the result of significant group effort. So let me instead concentrate on the one item I am most proud of –The Data Center Services group within the Global Foundation Services organization.

Over the last five years I have fondly watched the growth of one of the finest world class operations organizations on the planet when it comes to the running and maintaining these complex environments. Whether it’s the work they are doing in Research and Engineering driving our Generations approach to facility design, the construction of the facilities themselves, the tooling and automation developed to run our facilities, or the dedication and devotion of our Operations teams ensuring that all was in order, 24x7x365. To each and every one in the organization, I want to thank you so very much. You are only at the beginning of this journey and I know that the innovation, hard work, and dedication will continue to drive you and Microsoft to great things as the years progress. I may now watch your great work from outside of the company, but know that I will be proudly watching and rooting with great interest. Remember that challenging standard conventions and assumptions is at the root of greatness. I know you will.

As I now move to depart Microsoft, I find myself in much the same position as the Port Commissioner or Haricot farmers found themselves in when we announced we were coming to the town of Quincy, Washington. The land is cultivated and the ground fertile with an incredible organization. The conditions are ripe for growing and spring is once again here. I don’t know what is yet to come, but I know the endeavor will be successful.

You have the seeds and fields to do some incredible things. To continue to drive the thought leadership Microsoft has brought to bear. To you I formally pass on my bag with the sincerest knowledge and hope that what is to come will surely exceed what has been before.

To Microsoft and specifically Global Foundation Services, thank you for such a wonderful opportunity to be a part of history. It has been an experience like no other in my career and I truly hope that I have helped to move the company forward in some small way.

Sincerely,

Mike Manos

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.

Out of the Box Paradox – Manifested (aka Chicago Area Data Center begins its journey)

msdcblog — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:06:00 GMT

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

With modern conventional thinking and untold management consultants coaching people to think outside the box, I find it humorous that we have actually physically manifested an “Out of the Box Paradox” in Chicago.

What is an Out of the Box Paradox you ask? Well I will refer to Wikipedia on this one for a great example:

“The encouragement of thinking outside the box, however, has possibly become so popular that thinking inside the box is starting to become more unconventional. This kind of “going against the grain means going with the grain” mentality causes a paradox in that there may be no such thing as conventionality when unconventionality becomes convention.”

The funny part here is that we are actually doing this with….you guessed it…..boxes. Today we finished the first phase of construction and we are rolling into the testing of container-based deployments. Our facility in Chicago is our first purpose-built data center to accommodate containers on a large scale. It has been an incredibly interesting journey. The challenges of solving things that have never been done before are many. We even had to create our own container specification, one specifically with the end-user in mind to ensure we maximized the cost and efficiency gains possible, not to mention standard blocking and tackling issues like standardizing power, water, network and other interfaces. All sorts of interesting things have been discovered, corrected, and perfected. From electrical harmonics issues to streamlining materials movement, to whole new operational procedures.

The facility is already simply amazing and it’s a wonder to behold. Construction kicked off only one year ago and when completed it will have the capacity to scale to hundreds of thousands of servers which can be deployed (and de-commissioned as needed) very quickly. The joke we use internally is that this is not your mother’s data center. You get that impression from the first moment you step into the “hangar bay” on the first floor. The “hangar’s” first floor will house the container deployments and I can assure you it is like no data center you have ever seen. It’s one more step to the industrialization of the IT world, or at least the cloud-scale operations space. To be fair, and it’s important to note, only one half of the total facility is ready at this point, but even half of this facility is significant in terms of total capacity.

That “Industrialization of IT” is one of the core tenets of my mission at Microsoft. Throwing smart bodies at dumb problems is not really smart at all. The real quest is how to drive innovation and automation into everything that you do to reduce the amount of work that needs to be performed by humans. Dedicate your smart people for solving hard problems. It’s more than a mission, it’s a philosophy deeply rooted in our organization. Besides, industry numbers tell us that humans are the leading cause of outages in data center facilities. Our Chicago facility is a huge step forward to driving that industrialization increasingly forward. It truly represents an evolution and demonstrates what could happen when you blend the power of software and breakthrough innovative design and engineering. Even for buildings!

I have watched with much interest the back and forth on containers in the media, in the industry, and the interesting uses being proposed by the industry. The fact of the matter is that Containers are a great “Out of the Box Paradox” that really should not be terribly shocking to the industry at large.

The idea of “containment” is almost as old as mechanical engineering and thermodynamics itself. Containment gives you the ability to manage the heat or lack thereof more effectively in individual ecosystems. Forward looking designers have been doing “containment” for a long time. So going back to the paradox that “out of the box, is in the box thinking” shift, the concept is not terribly new. It’s the application at our scale and specifically to the data center world which is most interesting.

It allows us to get out of the traditional decision points common to the data center industry in that certain infrastructure decisions actually reside in the container itself, which allows for a much quicker refresh cycle of key components and the ability to swap out for the next greatest technology rapidly. Therefore, by default it allows us to deploy our capital infrastructure costs much more closely aligned with actual need versus the large step functions one normally sees in data center construction (build a large expensive facility, and fill it up over time versus build capacity out as you need it). This allows you to better manage costs, better manage your business, and give you the best possible ramp for technology refresh. You don’t particularly care if its AC or DC, if it’s water cooled or air cooled. Our metrics are simple – Give us the best performing, most efficient, lowest TCO technology to meet our needs. If today that’s AC, great. Tomorrow DC? Fantastic. Do I want to be able to do a bake-off between the two? Sure. I don’t have to reinvest huge funds in my facilities to make those changes.

For those of you with real lives and have not been following the whole container debates here is a quick recap -

Microsoft is using standard 40 foot shipping containers for the deployment of servers in support of the software + services strategy and in support of our cloud services infrastructure initiatives.
The containers can house as many as 2500 servers achieving a density of 10 times the amount of compute in the equivalent space in a traditional data center.
We believe containers offer huge advantages at scale in terms of both initial capital and ongoing operating costs.
This idea has met some resistance in the industry. As highlighted by my interesting back and forth with Eric Lai from Computerworld magazine. Original article can be found here, with my “Anthills” response found here.
Chicago represents one of the first purpose-built container-built facilities ever.

To be clear, as I have said in the past, containers are not for everyone, but they are great for us.

The other thing which is important is the energy efficiency of the containers. Now I want to be careful here as the reporting of efficiency numbers can be a dangerous exercise in the blogo-sphere. But our testing shows that our containers in Chicago can deliver an average PUE of 1.22 with an AVERAGE ANNUAL PEAK PUE of 1.36. I break these two numbers out separately because there is still some debate (at least in the circles I travel in) on which of these metrics is more meaningful. Regardless of your position on which is more meaningful, you have to admit those numbers are pretty darn compelling.

For the purists and math-heads out there, Microsoft includes house lighting and office loads in our PUE calculation. They are required to run the facility so we count them as overhead.

On the “Sustainability” side of containers it’s also interesting to note that shipping 2500 servers in one big container has a positive reduction on the CO2 related to transportation, let alone the amount of packaging material eliminated.

So in my mind, containers are driving huge cost and efficiency (read also as cost benefits in addition to “green” benefits) gains for the business. This is an extremely important point, as Microsoft expands its data center infrastructure, it is supremely important that we follow an established smart growth methodology for our facilities that is designed to prevent overbuilding—and thus avoid associated costs to the environment and to our shareholders. We are a business after all. We must do all of this while also meeting the rapidly growing demand for Microsoft’s Online and Live services.

Containers, and this new approach is definitely a change in how facilities have traditionally been developed, and as a result many people in our industry are intimidated by it. But they shouldn’t be. Data center’s have not changed in fundamental design for decades. Sometimes change is good. The exposure to any new idea is always met with resistance, but with a little education things change over time.

In that vein we are looking at holding our second Microsoft Data Center Experience (MDX) event in Chicago in the Spring/Summer 2009. Our first event held in San Antonio, was basically an opportunity for a couple hundred Microsoft enterprise customers to tour our facilities, ask all the questions they wanted, interact with our Data Center experts (mechanical, electrical, operations, facilities management, etc.), and generally get a feel to our approach. It’s not that ours is the right way, or the wrong way…..just our way. Think of an Operations event for Operations people, by Operations people.

It’s not glamorous, there are no product pitches, no slick brochures, no hardware hunks or booth babes, but hopefully it’s interesting. That first event was hugely successful with incredible feedback from our customers. As a result, we decided to do the same thing in Chicago with the very first container data center. Which of course makes things a bit tricky. While the facility will be going through a vigorous testing phase from effectively now moving forward, we thought it better to ensure that any and all construction activity be formally complete before we go moving large groups of people through our facility to ensure safety. Plus, I don’t think I have enough hard hats and safety gear for you all.

So if you attended MDX-San Antonio and really want to drill deeper in on Containers, in a facility custom built for them, or would like to attend just to ask questions, look for details on it from your Microsoft account management team or your local Microsoft sales office for details next Spring. (Although it’s not a sales event, you are more likely to reach someone there faster than calling into Global Foundation Services directly, after all we have a global infrastructure to run.)

/Mm