Microsoft Starts Thinking ‘Inside the Box’
Microsoft, when it’s not tweaking operating systems, releasing security patches, or dissing open source, has another project it’s bringing to the fore: it’s first data center in a box. (Uh, sorry, I meant “containerized datacenter facility.”)
The idea is that these data centers, literally housed in portable shipping containers, can be trucked and parked at a corporate site, and quickly be up and running.
As relayed by Mary Jo Foley in her leatest Microsoft Watch blog post, Microsoft, on April 1st (no fooling!) announced publicly its plans to build a completely containerized production data center. The facility will be in Microsoft’s Northlake, Illinois facility.
Microsoft’s James Hamiltion provided some additional details about the facility in a blog post: The facility “is a two-floor design where the first floor is a containerized design housing 150 to 220 40’ containers each 1,000 to 1,000 servers. Chicago is large facility with the low end of the ranges Mike (Manos who leads the Microsoft Global Foundations Data Center team) quoted yielding 150k serves and the high end running to 440k servers. If you assume 200W/server, the critical load would run between 30MW and 88MW for the half of the data center that is containerized. If you assume a PUE of 1.5, we can estimate the containerized portion of the data center at between 45MW and 132MW total load. It’s a substantial facility.”
Hamilton has been Microsoft’s thought leader on the data center in a box proposition. I posted some details about his vision last year. As Hamilton put it, a standard 20×8×8-foot shipping container is “ideal” for this purpose, since not only is it is rugged and built to withstand ocean voyages, but also “relatively inexpensive and environmentally robust.” Upon delivery to a site, a data center container could simply be attached to the network, chilled water, and powered up. Each container can be fully equipped with networking gear, compute nodes, and persistent storage.”
Other vendors getting into the data center in a box garme include IBM, Dell, Sun and Verari.
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