Welcome to Microsoft’s data centre evolution (previously called the “Generation 4 vision”). As earlier videos have shown, we’re heading towards the pre-manufacturing every part of the data centre: the IT, mechanical and electrical components as part of Pre-Assembled Components that we call an “ITPAC.” We placed one of these outside the University of Washington recently during Steve Ballmer’s cloud talk.

This pre assembled approach gives us more flexible deployment options in both speed and location for our data centres, plus it helps with environmental sustainability. All we’ll need in future is a concrete pad to land these things and the crucial Power Usage Effectiveness measure will be as low as 1.15 to 1.19. The units will house somewhere between 400 to 2,500 servers and could be built by a single person in as little as 4 days. I have ordered the parts to test this and plan to set one up in my garden (joke). 

Read more from Kevin Timmons on the MS datacenters blog

My boss just took off for Australia and New Zealand. Trying to get everything done before he left absorbed most of my time during the last few weeks, so after he left, I started catching up on my cloud services reading. This has been a busy time for cloud computing too! Here’s what I found.

I started with Microsoft’s official Cloud Services site and watched the 1.5 hour video of Steve Ballmer’s recent Microsoft Online Cloud Computing speech at the UW. You’ve got to watch the whole thing. I loved the “man on the street” videos with UW students, featuring Microsoft Channel 9’s Laura Foy. 

With a little more digging, I found a recent post by fellow Cloud Services blogger Steve Clayton, Ballmer says Microsoft is “All In” with the Cloud. This is a great summary of Steve’s speech and tightens up the message to five bullet points:

• The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities
• The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide, and take action
• The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions
• The cloud wants smarter devices.
• The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud.

I also found an InformationWeek article by Bob Evans, Global CIO: Ballmer's Cloud Commitment Makes Microsoft Relevant Again. Reading this article gave me goose bumps! Mr. Evans really gets it. I think that he does an excellent job of communicating the opportunities in the cloud, how committed Microsoft is to the future of cloud computing, and what an industry changing “bet-the-company” moment this really is. Both pages are recommended reading!

Did you know that Microsoft is actually one of the largest and most active players in cloud computing? Live Meeting, Bing, X-Box, Hotmail, and Microsoft Update are some of the cloud services that Microsoft has been running for several years. I’ve been working on Microsoft’s cloud computing offers in one capacity or another since Live Meeting 2005. The Microsoft Online Services team has released new features and functionality roughly every 6 to 9 weeks since November 2008, so we’ve been cranking on cloud computing for quite a while.

I’m excited to see that Microsoft’s commitment to cloud services is finally getting some attention. If you’d like to learn more about what’s going on with cloud computing, check out the links above and search for additional articles on Microsoft Cloud Services. All of our chips are on the table.

Providing online services like BPOS (http://mocp.microsoftonline.com)  are not like shipping server or client software. Once you cut the bits for on-premise software, they pretty much stay the same for a while. Not so with online services. Microsoft is continually updating them to provide more services, protocols, and features. This makes it a bit of challenge to keep current. Since we shipped the services a couple years ago, we've added a bunch of capability including POP3, SMTP relay, migration from Hosted Exchange, Powershell commandlets for migration and administration, and a bunch more. AND the price went down to only $10 a month!

In that spirit, I'm happy to announce that the default mailbox size for Exchange Online is now 25GB!

That's up from 5GB. This 5x increase is free of charge and automatically implemented on new users. You can increase existing users to 25GB if you need as your overall allocation for mailboxes has been increased to (25GB x number of users) instead of (5GB x number of users).  The best place to keep up to date BPOS feature announcements is the BPOS team blog http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/ so bookmark that blogs and track the RSS feed to stay up do date.

[credit: The Economist]

A lot is the answer as noted above in The Economist. They had a great special report a couple of weeks back on the enormous amounts of data we’re now creating in the digital age. For someone who remembers 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and loading computer games of an audio tape, the table above is a sobering read.

Of the articles in the special segment, I enjoyed Data, data everywhere and Clicking for gold. The former gives a real sense of how big the data challenge will become whilst the latter is about how the so called exhaust of information gleaned by websites is becoming incredibly powerful.

A few startling stats I gleaned:

• by 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 Exabyte's, according to Cisco.
• Wal Mart handles more than 1m transactions per day feeding in to a database of 2.5 petabytes
• The Large Hadron Collider at CERN generates 40 terabytes per second. It’s more than can be captured so scientists capture what they can and throw away the rest.
• UCSD calculated that an individual is bombarded with 34 gigabytes per day (they should come to my house)
• They also found that the average US household gets hit with 3.6 zettabytes (per year I think)

There is so much good stuff in this report. If you step back and think how much digital data you create yourself, it’s a just a huge, huge volume. Websites you visit, documents you read/write, photos, videos, blog posts…then think of all your friends doing that and every business doing that.

Tim O’Reilly is insightful as ever with his comment that for Internet companies, “data are the coin of the realm”. Amazon, Google, eBay, Microsoft, Facebook are all big players in this new era that will demand massive skills and massive computing to do realtime analysis and serve up just what you didn’t know you wanted, right when you want it :)

Cloud computing has a part to play here for sure in terms of number crunching capability (I see big scope for HPC type workloads on Windows Azure…stuff like Monte Carlo simulations) and storage. Getting that data in to the cloud may be the bigger problem and as the late Jim Gray was fond or reminding us, a bunch of disks and FedEx are a pretty good solution to that problem!

Anyway…stop reading me and go read the report. I’m just generating exhaust here and most of it’s noxious :)

Moving to the cloud requires reframing how a business thinks about its data and services. It's quite a leap to get from having everything on premise where you have total control (and responsibility) to having all or some of your key business services and data provided in the cloud. This reframing extends past just services such as mail or collaboration but extends of course into applications and computer power that could be hosted in Azure. While Microsoft servers and operating systems can and do deliver scale to support the biggest farms on the planet, cloud computing and services bring even greater requirements for scale, management, and efficiency.

Who better to collaborate with than Cray on how to provide massive computing power, at entirely new levels of efficiency as service?

See http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-399926.html