Microsoft Data Centers Blog

Last November we announced our zero carbon Data Plant R&D project in Cheyenne, Wyoming. For a quick refresher, we’re placing a small container data center we call an IT Pre-Assembled Component, or ITPAC, at a wastewater treatment facility in Cheyenne. A natural bi-product of a wastewater plant is methane gas, which is typically flared off because it’s uneconomical to recover and convert to grid energy. At our Data Plant, we view this methane gas as an opportunity to provide a reliable power source to power a data center, and we decided to launch this project to test the concept and the capabilities. Read More >>

Earth Day is Monday, April 22, providing a moment to reflect on the daily work we are doing to drive greater environmental sustainability at Microsoft and for our customers, partners, and the industry. While Earth Day is only a single day, sustainability is a year-round effort for my Data Center Advanced Development team, as well as our extended teams from Global Foundation Services, Environmental Sustainability, Microsoft Research, and all our cloud services groups. Read More >>

Microsoft has delivered online services since 1994 with the launch of MSN. Today, our engineering and operations teams build, manage and secure a$15 billion cloud-scale infrastructure that powers over 200 services for consumers and businesses 24x7x365 via globally distributed data centers, networks, and security mechanisms, software applications and tools. Our cloud supports more than 1 billion customers and 20 million businesses in 76 markets. With an annual investment of $9.5 billion in research and development, we are enabled to continue to accelerate the innovations in our operational processes to maximize reliability, performance, and efficiency as our capacity grows. Read More >>

In a post last month, I shared some new details about how Microsoft focuses on the use of software to engineer resiliency into our global network of cloud-scale data centers. I explained the fundamental shift we’ve made to viewing data centers through a systems integrator model, where we look at every aspect of the physical and operational environment as a component of an integrated system to drive continual improvement in performance, efficiency and service availability. By sharing the responsibility for service availability – from development to data center – we’re breaking down the silos that traditionally separate IT engineering activities, allowing Microsoft to define the data center environment as a converged ecosystem delivering improved reliability of our services and more satisfied customers. Read More >>

Operating and maintaining the infrastructure behind Microsoft’s huge cloud is a mission critical endeavor. With over 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, SkyDrive, Xbox Live, and the Windows Azure platform running in our data centers, the Global Foundation Services’ (GFS) team is a key component in delivering the highly available experience our customers expect from the cloud. To do this effectively, we’re continuously evolving our operational strategies to drive quality and efficiency up while lowering costs and increasing overall value to our customers. Read More >>