Microsoft Building `Containerized` Data Center (
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LAS VEGAS—Microsoft is in the
process of building the industry's first container-based data center.
Microsoft first said a year ago that it was considering the idea, and now
the concept is coming to fruition, Michael Manos, Microsoft's senior director
of Data Center Services, said April 1 in a keynote address at the AFCOM Data
Center World conference here.
The new center will be located in Northlake,
Ill., near Chicago.
Microsoft is also building new data centers in San Antonio;
Quincy, Wash.;
and Dublin, Ireland.
The Chicago facility will be the
only one with a "containerized" floor.
"This is the first data center of this kind that we know of, and we've
seen a lot of them," Microsoft Principal Power and Cooling Architect
Christian Belady told eWEEK.
It is an emerging trend in the industry for data centers to use containers as a
key component. Sun
Microsystems introduced the idea in October 2006 with its Project Blackbox
data center, and it has been selling them in increasing numbers ever since.
Each Blackbox package combines storage, computing, and network infrastructure
hardware and software—along with high-efficiency power and liquid cooling—in
modular units based on standard 20-by-8-by-8-foot shipping containers.
Each unit holds up to 250 Sun Fire blade servers (standard 19-inch-wide size)
and provides up to 1.5 petabytes of disk storage, 2 petabytes of tape storage
and up to 7TB of RAM. A fully configured
Blackbox unit weighs under 20,000 pounds and has front and rear doors, seven
service access points inside, and cutting-edge cooling and power distribution
equipment.
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