Mike Manos of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services has released some detail of ambitious plans for Microsoft's new generation of cloud compute infrastructure on his blog.

This is the result of long painstaking multidisciplinary R&D from Dan Costello and his engineers, and Microsoft's experience of running . Mike's blog post is longer than War and Peace, but very briefly Gen 4 defines a common framework for pre-fabrication of all aspects of datacenter infrastructure, not just the server component, to

  • support just-in-time delivery of capacity (building datacentres is a capital intensive activity)
  • be flexible enough to meet the range of characteristics for support and cost required across services as diverse as Live Spaces and Business Productivity Online

Much of the architecture is being put out in the public domain in a public-spirited effort to drive the whole industry forward.

See below an animation which illustrates some of the key concepts. I note the video shows mega-datacenters in several locations as yet unnannouced....

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