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July 14, 2009

Microsoft said it is planning to soon open a 700,000-square-foot data center in a Chicago suburb as soon as July 20, this after having opened a new 300,000 sq. foot facility in Dublin, Ireland on June 30.

Microsoft's newly proposed Northlake, Illinois data center is scheduled to open next Monday, which will help support its Software + Services strategy and the new Bing search engine, as well as other online services.

About 65 percent of the Northlake facility is optimized for housing containerized servers that can hold from about 1,800 to 2,500 servers each, according to infrastructure services general manager Arne Josefsberg.

The high density within each container can exceed about ten times that of traditional data centers, and this configuration conserves energy, paving the way for new power efficiency advancements that will yield an annual PUE (power usage effectiveness) average calculated at 1.22.

The new Illinois data center will include more than 50 parking stalls for the shipping containers, which can be wheeled in as needed and installed in hours, and its second floor will have 40U and 48U server racks, which will further expand the data center's overall capacity.

"It is really exciting to bring these two data centers online. We take great pride in the innovations they deliver to move the data center industry forward and to extend Microsoft's online services to customers globally," said Josefsberg.

"As Microsoft's Software + Services strategy progresses, these data centers will play a key supporting role," he added.

In the coming months, Low Cost Web Hosting Guide will follow up on this story and will asses a progress report on the many data center projects that Microsoft has, both in their planning stages as well as those that are in the process of getting implemented in the near future.

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Source: WHNG.