14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is right on track to opening a new datacenter in Quincy, WA in early 2011, revealed Kevin Timmons, General Manager of Datacenter Services. The facility is a state of the art server farm designed to sport a variety of innovations, just as a few others that the Redmond company has been working on.
The software giant has been hard at work designing and now building modular datacenters, based on the experience of creating and running facilities such as those inaugurated in 2010 in Chicago and Dublin.
Timmons enumerated some of the advantages of the Dublin facility, including server PODs and the leveraging of outside air economization in order to cut costs related to the cooling process as well as reduce infrastructure costs.
At the same time, a different strategy was applied when creating the Chicago datacenter. This facility makes use of water-side economization, for example, in contrast to the one in Dublin.
At the same time, the Chicago datacenter is designed for scalability with the help of IT Pre-Assembled Components (ITPACs), namely pre-manufactured, fully-assembled modules containing anywhere from 400 to 2,000 servers.
“The expansion in Quincy takes these ideas a step further by extending the flexibility of PACs across the entire facility using modular “building blocks” for electrical, mechanical, server and security subsystems.
“This increase in flexibility enables us to even better support the needs of what can often be a very unpredictable online business and allows us to build datacenters incrementally as capacity grows.
“Our modular design enables us to build a facility in significantly less time while reducing capital costs by an average of 50 to 60 percent over the lifetime of the project,” Timmons explained.
Microsoft already has a 500,000-square-foot server farm in Quincy, and the Phase 1 of the new datacenter will expand on the existing facility.
However, the Redmond company doesn’t plan to stop here. Timmons reveals that additional phases are in the works for this datacenter, and that they will be introduced as needed.
At the same time, the software giant plans to open more server farms by the end of this year.
“We will open other modular datacenters later in 2011 in Virginia and Iowa and I’ll be sharing more information about those facilities at that time,” Timmons promised.
“Our modular approach to design and construction with these facilities will allow us to substantially lower cost per megawatt to build and run our datacenters while significantly reducing time to market. This is the holy grail for most datacenter professionals…. fast, cheap and reliable – what more could you ask for?”