Data centres are a hot topic right now thanks to outsourcing, cloud computing and Software as a Service (or Software + Services).\u00a0 You might know a computer room but it’s nothing like a data centre in terms of scale, power, cooling, fire suppression, fault tolerance and processes.\u00a0 It’s a thoroughly different experience.<\/p>\n
Microsoft is building a set of new data centres around the world to host their new cloud computing (Azure) infrastructure for Software + Services.\u00a0 This includes the Grange Castle facility in Dublin that made news headlines a year ago when they turned the first sod.\u00a0 It appears Microsoft refers to the architecture being used as 3rd generation.<\/p>\n
The typical data centre is a large purpose driven building with pre-deployed power and cooling.\u00a0 There’s a huge cost to building\/maintaining\/operating this building until it’s fully populated.\u00a0 The big costs?\u00a0 Building, rent, water and power<\/em>.\u00a0 Electricity is a huge cost and we all know it’s only getting higher.\u00a0 Green (as in money\/taxation, not environment) Party politicians want carbon taxes and we’re likely to see those soon.\u00a0 Those operating costs are increasing.\u00a0 This makes it harder to keep computing costs down – more reason to seek cloud\/outsourcing services to capitalize on costs savings through shared or bulk buying, i.e. many clients in a managed data centre sharing costs.<\/p>\n Microsoft builds and maintains their own data centres so they are their own client.\u00a0 They can’t share those costs.\u00a0 I’ve heard that they buy some staggering number of servers per month so growth is constant and huge.\u00a0 They could build huge data centres and populate them but the overhead of half empty data centres would be massive.<\/p>\n Their 4th generation architecture<\/a> is a simple concept.\u00a0 Instead of building the huge building they will build a spine or back bone.\u00a0 They defined a modular architecture where they can drop in pre-built and populated building blocks in a just-in-time (JIT) basis.\u00a0 These blocks are similar to lorry containers on sight.\u00a0 They blocks are pre-fabricated so building costs are minimal.\u00a0 Because the building isn’t 1 huge block it also simplifies cooling, one of the big draws on power and a major draw of water.\u00a0 They are looking at using uncooled external air to cool the individual blocks.\u00a0 Each block has direct access to the external air.\u00a0 They might not get 19 degree Celsius internal temperatures but do they really need that?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Servers will happily run at 30 degrees.\u00a0 We only cool beneath that for historical reasons and for human comfort levels.<\/p>\n Using JIT MS can keep a certain amount of resources free while putting more on order.\u00a0 This Lego-style approach is a simple one and a money saver.\u00a0 Use what you need now, have some on reserve and have a fixed plan on what\/when you will purchase to maintain the reserve.<\/p>\n We do something similar at work<\/a>.\u00a0 We acquire servers only as required.\u00a0 We power up and network racks only as required.\u00a0 We keep a certain percentage of resources free and have a trigger to acquire fresh upgrades to our reserves.\u00a0 This keeps our operating costs down which we can pass on to our clients.\u00a0 Of course, we’re not on the same scale as MS’s data centres … yet \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Data centres are a hot topic right now thanks to outsourcing, cloud computing and Software as a Service (or Software + Services).\u00a0 You might know a computer room but it’s nothing like a data centre in terms of scale, power, cooling, fire suppression, fault tolerance and processes.\u00a0 It’s a thoroughly different experience. Microsoft is building … Continue reading “Microsoft Generation 4 Modular Data Centres”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t