Microsoft’s Cloud: Windows Azure

Microsoft’s new cloud development platform, Windows Azure, was unveiled today by Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles. Windows Azure provides developers on-demand compute and storage to host web applications and services in Microsoft’s data centers. Azure provides Microsoft with an online developer platform to compete with Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and a growing number of smaller platforms. 

Azure was released as a “community technology preview” and won’t be available until next year. Few details were released about pricing, with Ozzie saying it would be “competitive” and based on resource consumption.

“Today marks a turning point for Microsoft and the development community,” Ozzie said. “We have introduced a game-changing set of technologies that will bring new opportunities to Web developers and business developers alike. The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft’s commitment to openness and interoperability, promises to transform the way businesses operate and how consumers access their information and experience the Web.

Microsoft Will Cut Data Center Spending

Microsoft (MSFT) will reduce its investment in its data center expansion, the company said yesterday, citing the economic slowdown and the need to cut expenses. In yesterday’s earnings call, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell said the company will reduce its projected capital expenditures for 2008 by $300 million, all of which will come from planned data center spending.  

Liddell said Microsoft is now focused on internal operational efficiency and expense management. “In the near term, we’re reassessing our business plan and pulling back spending in lower priority areas,” he said.

Microsoft is nearing completion on the first phase of its $500 million data center in Northlake, Illinois, and has announced plans for similar $500 million projects in Dublin, Ireland and West Des Moines, Iowa. The company has already opened huge new data centers in Quincy, Washington and San Antonio. We’ve contacted Microsoft with specific questions about the impact of its capital expenditure cuts, and will update if we get more information.  

Microsoft: PUE of 1.22 for Data Center Containers

Microsoft says its testing shows that the data center containers it is installing in its new Chicago data center are extraordinarily energy efficient. The 40-foot shipping containers packed with servers can deliver a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) energy efficiency rating of 1.22, which rivals recent PUEs reported by Google. Microsoft’s Mike Manos revealed the PUE numbers in a blog post about the Chicago data center, which has just completed its first phase of construction.

“The facility is already simply amazing and it’s a wonder to behold,” Manos writes of the $550 million, 500,000 square foot facility in Northlake, Illinois. “The joke we use internally is that this is not your mother’s data center.  You get that impression from the first moment you step into the ‘hangar bay’ on the first floor. The hangar’s first floor (pictured above) will house the container deployments and I can assure you it is like no data center you have ever seen.  It’s one more step to the industrialization of the IT world, or at least the cloud-scale operations space.”

The 40-foot CBlox containers can house as many as 2,500 servers, and Manos said they allow Microsoft to achieve a density “10 times the amount of compute in a traditional data center.” The company says it will pack between 150 and 220 containers in the first floor of the Chicago site, meaning the massive data center could house between 375,000 and 550,000 servers in the container farm.   

It also is helping Microsoft meet its goals for extraordinary energy efficiency. “Now I want to be careful here as the reporting of efficiency numbers can be a dangerous exercise in the blogosphere,” Manos writes. “But our testing shows that our containers in Chicago can deliver an average PUE of 1.22 with an AVERAGE ANNUAL PEAK PUE of 1.36. I break these two numbers out separately because there is still some debate (at least in the circles I travel in) on which of these metrics is more meaningful.  Regardless of your position on which is more meaningful, you have to admit those numbers are pretty darn compelling.” 

Microsoft’s ‘Cloud Operating System’

There was a lot of buzz in the blogosphere yesterday about Steve Ballmer announcing that Microsoft will roll out a Windows “cloud operating system” in four weeks at the company’s Professional Developer’s Conference. It’s not entirely clear why this became a big story yesterday, as Microsoft has been talking publicly for several weeks about rolling out its cloud developer platform at PDC.

Microsoft’s platform was originally known as Red Dog. Microsoft’s Bob Muglia discussed the offering’s rollout at PDC back on Sept. 8, but referred to it as a service platform. Ballmer discussed the new developer platform in a presentation in Silicon Valley last week, as noted by Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat:

(Ballmer) said he couldn’t talk Project Red Dog now but Microsoft would reveal it in about six weeks at its next developer conference in Los Angeles. It’s a cloud-computing service that Microsoft will launch for application developers. Presumably, Red Dog is Microsoft’s answer to Google’s App Engine and Amazon’s web services.

Suddenly this week the Red Dog/services platform became the “Windows Cloud.” And a thousand links were launched. The Register quoted Ballmer as saying that the platform remains unnamed but “let’s just call it for the purposes of today ‘Windows Cloud.’”

Will the name stick? The combo of “Windows” pedigree and “Cloud” buzz seems to have done just fine so far.

Microsoft To Use Solar Panels in New Data Center

Microsoft plans to install solar panels on the roof of its new data center in San Antonio, and will use photovoltaic power to supplement the 50 megawatts of capacity it has provisioned from local utility CPS Energy. The solar panels are just one example of the many steps Microsoft is taking to incorporate green technologies into its new data centers. While providing a visible illustration of the company’s commitment to environmentally-friendly technology, the solar panels may not make much of a dent in the energy bills for the $550 million San Antonio data center.

Solar energy hasn’t been widely used in data centers because of the large amounts of energy required to power the servers and cooling equipment in modern mission-critical facilities. It requires a very large installation of photovoltaic (PV) solar panels to produce even a fraction of the energy required by most data centers.

UPDATE: While Microsoft discussed plans to install solar panels at the San Antonio data center during Monday’s media event, the system won’t be operational in the near future. “While it is indeed sunny quite a bit of the time in San Antonio, the economics for solar are not yet a good fit for this facility,” said Mike Manos, general manager of Global Foundation Services for Microsoft. ”As solar technology advances, we anticipate that solar may become a more viable option within a few years. As a result, we have enabled our building to accept the technology and weight of solar panels when the technology matures.”  

The only data center currently powered entirely by PV solar power is AISO (Affordable Internet Services Online), which operates a 1,500 square foot facility in Romoland, California. AISO powers its data center with 120 solar panels that generate DC power, which is then run through an inverter and stored in batteries.

Rethinking Mega-Data Centers

On a day when Microsoft executives were unveiling one of the world’s largest data center projects in San Antonio, some of its leading thinkers on data center design are arguing that the industry trend towards mega-datacenters “needs to be questioned.”

Microsoft’s James Hamilton, Ken Church and Albert Greenberg have published a paper for an upcoming ACM conference on “embarrassingly distributed cloud services” that could be delivered through a dispersed network of data center containers. These might include services such as online gaming, spam filtering and e-mail that could live close to the edge.

“Mega-datacenters remain useful and aren’t going away any time soon,” Hamilton writes on his blog. “But we argue that distributed micro-datacenters are appropriate for many workloads and can reduce costs, improve the quality of service, and increase the speed of deployment.” The researchers argue that a multi-faceted approach to infrastructure that combines mega-data centers and distributed containers could reduce costs.

Microsoft Makes San Antonio “A Force”

Few announcements have done more to boost data center development in a single area than Microsoft’s decision to build a mammoth new data center in San Antonio. This morning city officials and Microsoft executives celebrated the official opening of the $550 million, 477,000 square foot facility, which will help power Microsoft’s Online and Live Services.

“This Microsoft facility insures that San Antonio will be a force in the growth of the internet business,” said Mario Hernandez, president of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation. “We continue to see the growth of new data centers and expect to attract hardware and software companies that support the industry.”

The Microsoft project has established the Westover Hills area as a significant data center hub, which also hosts current or future projects for Stream Realty, Christus Health Systems, Valero Energy, Frost Bank and Power Loft.

“This next-generation facility reaffirms San Antonio’s future in technology and our overall economic development,” said San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger.

New from Microsoft: Data Centers In Tents

This month we’ve already had a patent from Google for floating data centers, and a proof-of-concept from Intel for a data center with almost no air conditioning. What’s next?

It turns out that Microsoft’s Christian Belady and Sean James have run their own outside-the-box proof of concept in which they’ve run a rack of servers under a tent in the fuel yard for one of the company’s data centers. Christian provides some details about the experiment in a blog post at The Power of Software:

Inside the tent, we had five HP DL585s running Sandra from November 2007 to June 2008 and we had ZERO failures or 100% uptime. In the meantime, there have been a few anecdotal incidents:

• Water dripped from the tent onto the rack. The server continued to run without incident.
• A windstorm blew a section of the fence onto the rack. Again, the servers continued to run.
• An itinerant leaf was sucked onto the server fascia. The server still ran without incident.

While few data center managers would be brave enough to submit mission-critical apps to such conditions, the experiment builds on Intel’s work in suggesting that sevrers may be hardier than believed, making more room for optimizing cooling set points and other key environmental settings in the server room. Suffice it so say that Microsoft is also on the same page with Intel when it comes to increased use of air-side economizers, which have been incorporated into the design of data centers Microsoft has under construction in Chicago and Dublin.