Microsoft's 24-year data center Road

The author of Wired, Robert McMillan, has written an article in which Microsoft has spent more than $15 billion trillion to build larger network facilities to support its internet-based products, such as Bing and Skype and Windows Azure.

The following is the full text of the article:

In 1989, Microsoft launched its first version of the SQL Server database, influenced by the multimedia division and under the influence of the then senior vice President Steve Ballmer. It also built its first data center, which, according to today's standards, is small: a 89000-square-foot facility in Washington State Redmond.

Since then, Microsoft has spent more than 15 billion dollars building larger-scale networking facilities to support its internet-based products, such as Bing, Skype and Windows Azure.

Microsoft is one of the few internet giants that is transforming the way data centers work. There are also Google, Amazon, Facebook and several other companies that are building massive, highly reliable data centers that do back-end computing for billions of of PCs and mobile devices. They design their own computers and set their own network protocols. They are experimenting with advanced cooling and power generation systems.

Companies are keeping a tight secret of most of the work, but from time to time these companies give us a chance to explore.

At Microsoft, the massive construction really started in 2006. "We are growing more and more visible, and we have made great strides in changing online services and Web services," said David Gauthier, director of Microsoft's data Center architecture and design management. "We realize that we need to figure out how to build and design our own data centers." ”

Since then, Microsoft has built its infrastructure in the Boydton of Chicago, Dublin, San Antonio, Texas and Virginia State. And after a few months, it opened a new 112 million-dollar facility in Wyoming State's Cheyenne. Microsoft is also working on a 5.5 million-dollar experiment called data plant, which includes a portable data center powered by methane from a local sewage treatment plant.

Experiments like data plant are interesting, but Microsoft's bets have been on how to upgrade their data centers using software.

Take the Chicago data Center for example. There, Microsoft has placed dozens of open-air modules called It-pac.

Microsoft's IT-PAC Modular data center

It-pac is a unique design for Microsoft. It can hold up to 2500 servers in it and use High-tech atomization technology to cool the server. In the Chicago Data Center, IT-PAC does not use standby generators.

"These cabinets and thousands of servers are not equipped with generators," Gauthier said. "When our services produce any form of fluctuations or problems, we can transfer these loads to another datacenter without impacting the user experience." ”

Now, Microsoft does not want to run all the services on these servers, but find out which types of programs can handle this type of failover.

This means that they are doing business based on software, like moving computing from a storm-threatened data center to another datacenter, reducing the risk of power outages.

Microsoft's 1 billion customers expect its Web services to never go away, and Microsoft is clearly overhauling its hardware. But the real purpose of the company is to properly distribute the workload by using real smart software, so that all the server workloads are balanced.