MICROSOFT NEW DATA CENTER

IT NEWS :: Microsoft's newest and largest data center

Alongside a Chicago highway, under the flight path from O'Hare airport, is a $500 million computer. Opened on July 20 in Northlake, Ill., it is Microsoft's newest and largest data center, a machine that unites several hundred thousand computer servers in the task of taking Microsoft, and much of corporate America, into a continually changing online world. The building's raw statistics suggest a powerful, monolithic force. The data center's 702,000 square feet of space consumed 3,400 tons of steel, 2,400 tons of copper and 26,000 cubic feet of concrete. Inside its vast open rooms are 190 miles of cable-holding conduit pipes, and 7.5 miles of chilled water to cool off the servers. It is the first point of consumption for the nuclear-fueled Elmhurst power grid, initially taking 30 megawatts of power, enough power to supply 20,000 U.S. homes, with plans to take 30 megawatts more. Aside from a few offices for the total of 45 engineers, outside security people and janitors who look after Northlake full time, there are no windows on a structure that could cover a couple of city blocks were it to be in an urban locale. The hallways are mostly empty, save for security cameras and biometric readers.


Microsoft also hopes to make a lot of money off Northlake, of course, and that means adding and experimenting. The second floor houses four large rooms, each 12,000 square feet, with perhaps 24 rows of server racks, each 50 machines high and six cabinets deep. This is the fixed baseline of computers for Northlake, consuming 10 megawatts of power from transformers across the hall. The computers managing the power at Northlake run on the older Windows XP software, since Microsoft does not want to take chances with the newer Vista operating system. The ground floor is reserved for more radical design and production shifts. The 20 megawatts headed there feed into modified trucking containers that are shipped from major computer manufacturers with 1,200 to 2,000 servers apiece inside. (Working at this scale, you don't want to be unpacking cardboard and throwing away Styrofoam). The unmarked white containers are lifted off long-haul trucks and pushed into one of 112 parking bays with crane hooks and compressed air, often with a power-management container placed atop, for a total of 120,000 pounds of computing. Northlake's power, cooling and network cables are hooked in, and within eight hours from arrival, 2,000 more machines are part of the giant node.

The containers are locked, and while it is possible to get inside them, they are mostly off-limits to the skeleton staff, only three of which actually work for Microsoft. At this scale, the virtualization and management is almost entirely automated. If one or two servers goes out, the problem is just ignored, and machine breakdowns are the vendor's problem to fix. The containers are built to be replaced every two to five years, and might never be opened in that time. Even as Northlake comes online, joining a similar data center Microsoft opened in Dublin last spring, the company is talking about the changes it has to make in the next generations of computing centers. Power will become as modular as the servers. Every machine will be inside a single layer of management and virtualization, worldwide. The competition--Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and Apple are all racing ahead with data centers of their own--will keep coming.