Where the cloud meets the ground

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

Related Articles

Dell bets on corporate spend for recoverySatyam gets notices for 1,230-cr claimsED attaches properties of Raju and associatesRajus shared spoils of fictitious profits

: It is almost as easy as plugging in a laser printer. Up to 2,500 servers—in essence, souped-up PCs—are crammed into a 40-foot shipping container. A truck places the container inside a bare steel-and-concrete building. Workers quickly connect it to the electric grid, the computer network and a water supply for cooling. The necessary software is downloaded automatically. Within four days all the servers are ready to dish up videos, send emails or crunch a firm’s customer data.

This is Microsoft’s new data centre in Northlake, a suburb of Chicago, one of the world’s most modern, biggest and most expensive, covering 5,00,000 square feet and costing $500 million. One day it will hold 4,00,000 servers. The entire first floor will be filled with 200 containers like this one. Michael Manos, the head of Microsoft’s data centres, is really excited about these containers. They solve many of the problems that tend to crop up when putting up huge data centres: how to package and transport servers cheaply, how to limit their appetite for energy and how to install them only when they are needed to avoid leaving expensive assets idle.

But containers are not the only innovation of which Manos is proud. Microsoft’s data centres in Chicago and across the world are equipped with software that tells him exactly how much power each application consumes and how much carbon it emits. “We’re building a global information utility,” he says.

Engineers must have spoken with similar passion when the first moving assembly lines were installed in car factories almost a century ago, and Microsoft’s data centre in Northlake, just like Henry Ford’s first large factory in Highland Park, Michigan, may one day be seen as a symbol of a new industrial era.