Two More Microsoft Mega Datacenters next month

Our Global Foundation Services team posted on their blog yesterday about two more mega data centers coming online next month:

July marks the launch of our two newest mega data centers in Chicago and Dublin. Our Dublin facility will go live on July 1, followed by our Chicago facility on July 20 to support our growing Online, Live, and Cloud services.

These are whoppers. Dublin covers 303,000 sq feet and has 5.4 mega watts of power available now...though it'll expand to 22.2 mega watts over time and with customer demand. One notable factor about this data center is its use of outside air cooling which is significantly more energy efficient than using cooling units.

The Chicago data center is even bigger at 700,000 sq ft (16 football fields) and a max power of 60 mega watts. This is the data center that makes significant use of containers which do a lot to help conserve energy. Each container houses somewhere between 1800 and 2500 servers and are sort of like big Lego blocks.

On a related topic, we now also have a Cloud Computing Futures group in MSR - a sure sign of the strategic importance of these data factories to Microsoft. What's their mission?

treat the data center as an integrated system—a holistic entity—and optimize all aspects of hardware and software

Should be fun to watch. Oh and a final bonus for those who missed it is the whitepaper we released back in may titled Securing Microsoft's Cloud Infrastructure.