Microsoft To Open Two Huge Data Centers In July

Microsoft's Dublin data center will go live Wednesday and is Microsoft's largest data center outside the U.S. The 303,000-square-foot building has 5.4 megawatts (1 million watts) of critical power available now and will be able to expand to 22.2 megawatts in the future, said Arne Josefsberg, general manager of infrastructure services, in a Monday blog post.

As anyone who has traveled to Ireland can attest, the country's cool year-round climate is tough to escape, but Microsoft plans to use this to its advantage by channeling outside air into the data center to boost power efficiency, according to Josefsberg.

Microsoft's Chicago data center -- which is situated in the suburb of Northlake, Illinois -- will go live July 20. It's a much larger facility that spans more than 700,000 square feet and will come online with 30 megawatts of critical power, with an additional 30 megawatts of expansion capacity, Josefsberg said. The facility will eventually house up to 300,000 servers, a feat made possible by Microsoft's adoption of the "data center in a box" approach pioneered by Sun Microsystems.

Container architecture offers optimal data center energy efficiency, and Microsoft measures this through Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a metric 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.

Microsoft's energy efficiency claims are opening up a new front in its battle with Google, which also uses containers in its data centers. Microsoft expects the Chicago data center to run at a yearly PUE average of 1.22, but Google -- which has claimed that its data centers are the world's most efficient -- last October reported that six of its largest facilities averaged a PUE of 1.21, with some as low as 1.13.

Earlier this month, Microsoft hired former Yahoo Vice President of Operations Kevin Timmons -- who's reportedly a strident believer in PUE -- and appointed him to lead the Data Center Services organization within Microsoft's Global Foundation Services (GFS) division.