Microsoft to open two mall-sized data centers

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. on Monday said it is preparing to flip the switch on what will eventually be more than 1 million square feet of data center space in two facilities, one in Chicago, the other in Dublin, Ireland. These centers will house hundreds of thousands of servers to help support the company's Bing search engine and other online services.

Microsoft isn't saying how many servers the facilities will house, but it is offering a partial picture. The Chicago center, which opens July 20 and is now said to be 700,000 square feet in size, will use containers that can be the size of tractor-trailers, with 1,800 to 2,500 servers each. The first phase of the Chicago center to go live has more than 50 parking stalls for shipping containers, which Microsoft said can be wheeled in and installed in hours. The facility's second floor will have server racks.

The Dublin facility, at just over 300,000 square feet, opens July 1 and isn't using containers.

These data centers coming online at the same time Congress is dealing with energy legislation. The House last week narrowly approved an energy bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), that requires development of a voluntary program aimed at improving the energy efficiency of data centers.

Arne Josefsberg, Microsoft's general manager of infrastructure services, wrote in a blog post that the Microsoft data centers will be energy efficient. The Dublin facility "makes extensive use of outside air" to chill the facility, while the containers used in Chicago "will help us realize new advancements in power efficiency."

Indeed, Microsoft, Google, Hewlett-Packard and other IT firms that build mega-scale data center operations will no doubt argue that their approach is far more energy efficient than the typical, outdated enterprise data centers. Data centers will need to be efficient under the cap-and-trade component of the House bill, which now goes to the Senate.

Data centers that buy their energy from utilities that rely on coal, for instance, may pay a premium for energy under cap-and-trade, because polluters will need to buy an "emissions permit" to release carbon dioxide. Whether that is a significant cost or not will depend on the permit pricing, something that has not yet been determined.

The energy bill is expected to face a much more difficult test in the Senate.

President Barack Obama on Monday said he is speeding up spending of $346 million in stimulus funding to expand development and deployment of energy-efficient technologies in residential and commercial buildings. He also announced new efficiency standards on fluorescent and incandescent lighting, which he said would eventually eliminate the need for as many as 14 coal-fired plants.

Read more about servers and data center in Computerworld's Servers and Data Center Knowledge Center.