14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft unveiled plans to build the largest data center in Russia, an investment estimated at around $500 million. Located in the Irkutsk Region in Siberia, the Data Processing Center will be the first of its scale in the country, with some 10,000 servers. Birger Steen, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer in Russia and CIS, announced the company's plans for the server farm in Siberia, and underlined the fact that this could be just the first example of additional Data Processing Centers to follow on Russian territory. At the end of the past week, the Irkutsk administration and Microsoft inked an intent agreement focused on IT development that would deliver the region with licensed software.
"The Memorandum of Understanding signed with the Irkutsk regional government aimed to expand IT use in the government sector and launch several training programs locally," said Evgeny Danilov, Microsoft Russia PR director, as cited by DataCenterKnowledge. "A data center was one of the topics of negotiation with the Irkutsk regional administration, where the parties agreed to continue discussions later. Though Microsoft Russia is working on potential data center construction in Russia, we are still far from final site selection."
Server farms are one of the crucial aspects in the race for Internet domination. And in this context, the new data center announced for Siberia is yet another facet of the Microsoft - Google face-off. Server farms essentially provide the infrastructure for the two companies' online offerings. Of course that for Microsoft this does not by any means limit itself to the Windows Live cloud products and services. And the Siberia server farm is but one example of Microsoft's investment in Data Processing Centers with similar projects based in Chicago, Dublin, San Antonio, Santa Clara and Quincy, Washington.
"All of the Microsoft product groups are going to have to have some online component to them," revealed Mike Manos, Microsoft's senior director of data center services, according to Beyond Binary. "One of the outgrowths of that has been the data center program. You never want to have infrastructure be the reason you can't grow your business."