Microsoft owns four of the world's largest data centers and may add a fifth
As the IT industry moves to cloud computing one fact remains unmistakable: the cloud, while somewhat abstract to end users, still has to exist in the physical world as a data center full of heavy iron and humming like the factory that it is — a factory manufacturing compute cycles.
The Web site Data Center Knowledge recently listed the top 10 data centers in the world, ranked by square footage, and four of them are run by Microsoft. A possible new Microsoft data center in the Eastern U.S. could someday be a fifth.
Microsoft earned fifth place on the top 10 list for a 700,000-square-foot facility in Chicago, sixth for a 550,000-square-foot center in Dublin, Ireland, and tied with itself for ninth place for two 470,000-square-foot facilities in Quincy, Washington, and San Antonio.
And Data Center Knowledge reported today that Microsoft is rumored to be close to a deal to build a data center in Christiansburg, Va. If it’s true and if the Virginia center is close to the same size as the ones in Dublin, Quincy and San Antonio — 500,000 square feet, plus or minus — then it would be the sixth-ranked center. Dublin would move to 7th and Quincy and San Antonio would move to 10th.
Bumped off the list would be a 407,000-square-foot facility operated by Switch Communications in the casino capital of Las Vegas (imagine if that could be used to count cards).
Right now, city officials in Christiansburg are not identifying who might be interested in the site, except to tell Data Center Knowledge (DCK) that it’s not Google. A Microsoft spokesperson told me by e-mail this afternoon that “we have no other facilities to anounce at this time.”
However, DCK notes that the Christiansburg Town Council recently exempted an unnamed, propsective tenant of the Falling Branch Corporate Park (in which the project would be built) from a diesel fuel storage limit. And what do we know all data centers need? Diesel-fueled backup generators, of course, and the variance in Christiansburg would allow for as many as 30 of them.
As Microsoft pursues its “We’re all in” cloud strategy, it’s going to need more of its own data center capacity. As it offers more cloud versions of its on-premise enterprise applications –Windows Server, Exchange, SharePoint and others — it’s going to have to prove to the market that its cloud services are going to be capable, reliable and efficient, especially compared to the cloud competition coming from Google.
I recently met in Texas with people from chipmaker AMD as well as hardware makers Dell and HP to talk about cloud computing. At one point, the discussion with them and other reporters like me turned to the impact of cloud computing on server sales. If everybody gets their compute cycles from the cloud, won’t you be losing server sales and sales of the chips in them? No, company officials said, and it wasn’t the case with virtualization or the move to dual-core, quad-core or other multi-core chips. Such improvements in computing efficiency only allow IT capacity to keep pace with increasing demand for compute cycles.
Centers like the ones on the top 10 list, and possibly the one on the drawing board in Virginia, will continue to evolve and grow.
By the way, the world’s largest data center, number one on DCK’s list, is the Lakeside Technology Center at 350 E. Cermak Road in Chicago at a whopping 1.1 million square feet. The multitenant data center, owned by Digital Realty Trust, is housed in a historic building that used to house the printing presses of the commercial printer R.R. Donnelley Co. Lakeside Technology Center draws 100,000 megawatts of electricity from the local power grid and maintains 50 backup generators.
