Microsoft opened its first data center in 1989. Data centers from this era, considered
generation 1, employed little to no air flow management; rooms were kept very
cool which resulted in PUEs of 2.0 or higher.
The original rationale for building these types of data centers was really to
consolidate compute resources that were previously distributed across the
network. Today, organizations with these
types of data centers are struggling because they’re running out of power or
space or cooling capacity.
In 2007, Microsoft decided to start building designing and
directly operating its own data centers because the cost of maintaining its
generation 1 facilities was rising too fast.
These generation 2 data centers were primarily about increasing density
and accelerating deployment. Unlike the
previous generation where equipment was installed into racks piecemeal and was often non-uniform, racks
fully populated with blade servers were now deployed and brought online very
quickly. Moreover, airflow was now being
optimized for the rack instead of the server which improved the efficiency of
these data centers considerably, achieving PUEs between 1.4-1.6.
A lot of today’s modern data centers would be considered
generation 2 by Microsoft’s standards where high density racks of blade servers
are aligned into hot and cold isles in the data center with or without hot isle
containment systems.
A year later, Microsoft adopted the concept of containment
and starting deploying servers in ISO standard shipping containers. These containers now allowed Microsoft to
deploy large quantities of severs very quickly with predictable results because
of the uniformity of the equipment in the containers. For example, when a container arrives onsite,
it can be fully provisioned and operational within 8 hours. Moreover, by tighly regulating airflow inside the
container, increasing the set point temperate, and increasing its use of air
and water side economizers, Microsoft was able to improve its efficiency to
where these generation 3 containerized data centers are now operating with PUEs
between 1.2 and 1.5.
In its latest data center designs, considered generation 4,
Microsoft is incorporating all the learning from its previous generations and
is now deploying modular data centers where it builds an engineering spine and
modules are connected to it in a plug-in-play fashion. With
this design, Microsoft is able to reduce its operating expenses because its using
adiabatic cooling which works like a swamp cooler to cool the servers inside IT
pre-assembled components (IT PACs). This
type of cooling is considerably less expensive (and uses less water) than operating chillers because the
power is being used to move air rather than chill water. Microsoft is also reducing its capital
expenses with this latest design because less of the data center is being set
aside for mechanicals like chillers and other supporting equipment. Additionally, the components to build the data
center are being supplied by several vendors from around the world. This allows Microsoft to have a
just-in-time approach to building data centers where they can quickly add
capacity according to demand signals it receives from the service teams.
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