MS Ireland is opening the new data centre in Dublin tomorrow (July 1st 2009). It’s down the Nangor Road, near the Air Corps base, and across from the Grange Castle golf course. Why there? That’s the most connected road in Ireland, thanks mainly to the presence of DataElectronics (DEG). DEG is an Irish colo hosting facility and just so happens to be the one we use at work.
This data centre will host MS internal service but also the hosted services. Being American, it’s subject to the Patriot Act so companies worried about the European/Irish data protection directive might not be able to consider those services. Otherwise, there’s some seriously cool offerings for small, medium and large businesses.
Grangecastle is “is the first “mega-data center” Microsoft has built outside the U.S. The 303,000 square foot first phase of the building will be supported by 5.4 megawatts of electricity and have a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.25, the company said. The $500 million project will eventually include about 550,000 square feet of space”. This data centre will run “hot”, i.e. not at the usual 19C or 21C but at 30C. This saves a fortune on air conditioning power consumption and is fully supported by HP, MS’s (and mine) preferred supplier of servers and storage.
A Chicago data centre will also be opening. This is the first of MS’s next generation data centres based on a fault tolerant, scalable, economic and power efficient container model. Each module is a pre-build container that is dropped into place and connected to a permanent corridor.
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PS Microsoft, I’ll be just around the corner if you feel like giving me a tour tomorrow 😉