Microsoft Touts Efficiency Of Chicago Data Center
In a Monday blog post, Michael Manos, General Manager, Data Center Services, said Microsoft has finished the first phase of construction on its Chicago data center, its first facility designed with the container-based approach.
Located in the Chicago suburb of Northlake, Illinois, Microsoft's $500 million, 550,000 square foot data center will have the capacity to scale to "hundreds of thousands of servers," Manos wrote.
Microsoft also offered statistical proof of the progress it's making in trimming data center power consumption. Microsoft used Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a metric for energy efficiency that divides the total amount of power a data center uses by the amount of power consumed by the IT infrastructure within it, with lower numbers indicating better efficiency.
The Chicago data center delivered a PUE of 1.22, with an average annual peak PUE of 1.36, according to Manos.
Google earlier this month claimed that its data centers are the world's most efficient, and launched a Website that explains how it arrived at this conclusion. Google, in a year-long study of six of its large scale data centers, reported an annual average PUE of 1.21, with some data centers reaching quarterly PUE values as low as 1.13.
Manos said the container-based data center approach is driving huge cost and efficiency gains, and also enables Microsoft to avoid the expense of unnecessary infrastructure build-outs.
"This is an extremely important point, [because] as Microsoft expands its data center infrastructure, it is supremely important that we follow an established smart growth methodology for our facilities that is designed to prevent overbuilding -- and thus avoid associated costs to the environment and to our shareholders," wrote Manos.