Micorosft Shares Ultra-Modern Data Center Vision

At the DatacenterDynamics conference in New York recently, Microsoft data center general manager Kevin Timmons outlined some prototype work to design next generation of data centers. The work is in collaboration with Microsoft Research.

Microsoft's data centers may not be huge buildings of tightly packed with server racks, but rather rows of small, stand-alone IT units spread across acres and acres of cool, cheap land. Diagrams from Timmons’ presentation depicted facilities with no side walls and a pointed roof with vents at the top.

IT PACs, or IT preassembled components, are small, self-contained units that are assembled off-site and can be linked together to build out an entire data center. The idea is instead of paying $400 million or more up front to build a data center, we would purchase some land, build a sub-station, and then populate the acreage with modular units of servers as demand grows.

For more information, see Microsoft Envisions Ultra-modular Data Centers in PCWorld and Microsoft’s Timmons: ‘Challenge Everything’ on Data Center Knowledge.

Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation