Microsoft Data Centers Blog

Compliance is a popular and often debated cloud services topic. I see this firsthand in my role as a senior director in Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services (GFS) Online Services Security and Compliance organization. GFS manages Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. The Online Services Security and Compliance team provides infrastructure security, compliance and reliability capabilities to Microsoft’s 200+ cloud and online services. Read More >>

Microsoft’s General Manager of Data Center Services Christian Belady will present on Wednesday, May 15 at the Uptime Symposium in Santa Clara, Calif., discussing the company’s cloud infrastructure strategy and how the latest technology trends are influencing to changes in our data centers. Read More >>

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 >>

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 >>