The New York Times has launched a series looking at the
environmental and economic impacts of cloud computing. These are
critical issues to all cloud users and providers, and areas in
which Microsoft has dedicated substantial resources, helped create
industry metrics for, and publicly shared our best practices on for
many years. We may not agree with all of the conclusions that the
Times reaches, but we appreciate their desire to focus attention on
these important topics.
I want to share my thoughts on a couple areas The Times reported
on. I joined Microsoft's Data Center Advanced Development team in
2011 to continue to accelerate the company's focus on data center
resource requirements including power consumption, water usage, and
carbon emissions, so these issues are core to my work.
Before jumping in, I want to start with our most fundamental
beliefs about cloud computing and data centers. At Microsoft, we
believe that cloud computing has the potential to revolutionize how
people everywhere work, play and communicate. We also believe that
cloud computing, combined with continued innovation in data center
design and operations, can reduce the energy consumption and
environmental impacts of the technology the world relies upon for
productivity, communication and entertainment. When it comes to
energy consumption, environmental sustainability, and strong
communities, we believe online services are not the problem; they
are actually a huge part of the solution. And we are
committed to working with the industry, customers, policymakers,
and local communities to ensure that we achieve the full promise of
cloud computing in a safe and sustainable way.
The first installment of the Times series looked
at the energy usage of a wide range of data centers around the
world. While the article identifies the key issues of efficiency
and utilization, it conflates these two key but distinct
challenges, wrongly implying that underutilization of servers in
data centers equates to unneeded consumption of massive amounts of
energy. In doing so the article fails to recognize that not
all data centers are created equal, nor are the operations and
software applications running inside those data centers equally
utilized. Several other news and industry observers have raised questions about
some of the analysis, in particular the way the article doesn't
draw distinctions between modern, state-of-the-art data centers
managed by global cloud service providers and smaller, older data
centers managed by corporate IT departments.
By way of background, efficiency is a measure of how well the
system operates when it is working. If a server isn't working, even
the oldest data centers have technology to adjust their consumption
of electricity and water. In contrast, utilization measures how
often the system is performing useful work. For example, if I am
considering the purchase of a car and efficiency is my chief
concern, I may opt for a hybrid. However, if I determine that I
will only be driving or utilizing the car a few times a month, a
car-sharing service might be a better fit.
At Microsoft we are focused on both issues, and are working to
provide efficiencies that were unheard of a few short years
ago. We are on a journey where the innovation rate is
staggering. Indeed, the fundamental promise of the cloud and the
reasons that Microsoft has invested so heavily in evolving the data
center infrastructure and the software applications running in them
is that we believe our cloud services can help improve both
efficiency and utilization. To continue the car analogy, you could
say that with our cloud services we're offering enterprise
customers a hybrid car-sharing service that gives them access to
the most efficient computing power available, and lets them use
only the resources they need, when they need them.
The constraints experienced by the thousands of corporate IT
departments, that result in inefficiency and underutilization,
cannot be resolved without a paradigm shift similar to the
evolution of sending a letter via a mail truck that took days to
arrive (that is costly, time consuming and uses a lot of carbon) to
clicking the send button and instantly delivering thousands of
letters to customers today. The efficiency of our modern,
right-sized, Generation 4 data centers enables the high utilization
possible in a globally distributed cloud environment.
A few years ago Microsoft commissioned a study by Accenture and the environmental
consulting firm WSP that looked at the total energy savings
resulting when organizations move common business applications such
as Microsoft Exchange for e-mail from their own servers to servers
hosted by Microsoft and other cloud operators. The study found that
large enterprises can expect to cut their energy use per user by at
least 30 percent and small business up to 90 percent when moving to
the highly optimized and efficient cloud data centers we operate.
Microsoft's latest data centers
use about 50 percent less energy than those from three years
ago, and only one to three percent of the water used by traditional
data centers in the industry.
Additionally, by migrating applications from physical to virtual
machines and consolidating these applications onto shared physical
hardware, Microsoft data centers are increasing utilization of
server resources such as central processing unit (CPU), memory, and
disk input/output. Microsoft has been using technologies such as
Hyper-V to increase virtualization and thus utilization year over
year, which in turn helps increase the productivity per watt of our
operations. Microsoft is also actively working on broad-based
adoption of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud operating system, which
uses virtualization in its core. On Windows Azure, an
application typically has multiple instances, each running a copy
of all or part of the application's code. Each of these instances
runs in its own virtual machines, with a hypervisor specifically
designed for use in the cloud.
Microsoft has also been on a path of continual improvement with
respect to the energy consumption in our data centers. Energy is a
core concern, and one of the largest operating expenses for our
data centers. Although we have achieved substantial reductions in
the energy required to provide reliable, cost-effective on-line
services, we continue to invest millions in driving further
innovation in this area. While inefficiencies and waste may get
lost in enterprise IT environments, I can assure you they are not
lost at Microsoft. Our customers expect reliable, secure cloud and
online services and
we are committed to providing those services with
sustainability, efficiency and cost in mind.
The second Times installment looked at the
town of Quincy, Washington, home to a number of large data centers,
including those operated by Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell and others. The
article uses what we believe are a few isolated situations to paint
a negative picture of the relationship between big data center
operators, including Microsoft, and the local community.
We are proud of our relationship with Quincy. Microsoft
has created over 50 good-paying permanent jobs in Quincy, and
hundreds more construction jobs. Our property taxes have
helped fund community services, including an expansion of the local
library and a new fire station. We built a multi-million dollar
water treatment plant at Quincy, and
leased it to the city for 30 years for $10 per year last year.
We operate our facilities safely and we follow all applicable laws
and regulations, but even more importantly we are part of the
Quincy community.
One section of the article implies that Microsoft has run its
diesel backup generators in excess of what is required to provide
safe, reliable power to our data centers. We would respectfully
disagree. Diesel generators are a costly alternative to
grid-supplied power. The cost to run generators is several times
higher than power purchased from the grid. And that doesn't account
for the costs associated with purchasing, installing, and
maintaining the generators. As we have previously
stated, we are working to create ever-greater efficiency, power
supply reliability, and system resiliency in our data centers and
software applications, with the goal of significantly reducing or
even eliminating the use of generators entirely. We are
already doing this in our Chicago data center, where our container
bays are not backed up with generators. In addition, the
newest phase of our Boydton, Virginia facility is designed without
any generators, a reflection of more fully resilient applications
running there. We will continue trending in this direction.
One of the main reasons we can do this is because of the scale at
which our operations run.
These are important issues, and we will continue to work with
industry, governments, customers, local communities, and other
stakeholders to improve the efficiency, sustainability,
reliability, and safety of our data centers, and to share our best
practices with others. It's great to dream about what lies
just beyond the horizon and work towards helping our customers
achieve greater efficiencies as well. The pace of technology change
makes the ability to analyze our industry even tougher today than
it used to be. But our ability to deliver everything I discussed
above is a reality today. Our web-scale cloud infrastructures and
software applications has fueled an incredible transformation in
the workplace, delivering ever-more powerful tools that have
increased productivity, streamlined communications, and improved
our ability to help over a billion customers and 20 million
businesses in over 76 markets worldwide find and use information.
Our fundamental belief that technology can change the world and
improve people's lives is why we do what we do.
You can read more about our best practices for cloud data
centers in published videos, papers, and blogs available on our web
site, please visit www.globalfoundationservices.com.
Read More >>
