The fallout from Thursday's cost-cutting moves by Microsoft continues. On Friday, Microsoft announced that it is delaying its plans for a massive data center to be built in West Des Moines, Iowa.
It is an abrupt reversal for Microsoft, which announced its plans for Iowa just five months ago as part of its massive push into the data center business. By October, though, the software maker was already detailing plans to cut its data center spending by $300 million. Now Microsoft is looking to cut things even further.
"We are still continuing construction of our facilities in Chicago and Dublin, and are planning to open them as customer demand warrants, Microsoft's Mike Manos and Arne Josefsberg said in a blog posting on Friday. "But given the current economic climate we're going to do the right thing for our business and shareholders and revisit our plans on a quarter-by-quarter basis."
Microsoft tried to put its best spin on the move, saying that long-term the cash crunch will help drive customers to turn to Microsoft rather than building out pricey data centers themselves. Josefsberg and Manos also said that Microsoft will find less expensive ways to have the capacity it needs to run Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, and all of Microsoft's other online services.
"We've been preparing for lean times for a while," the pair said. "This recession is the ideal backdrop to implement small changes that target big needs. Frugality drives innovation, and limited resources are just another forcing function to develop creative solutions to infrastructure needs. For our industry, this means more reasons to identify the small tweaks to products or operational approaches that can unlock big opportunities."
An aerial view of the site in West Des Moines, Iowa, where Microsoft is now delaying plans to build a massive data center.
(Credit: Microsoft)Microsoft is taking its container approach to data centers a step further, making the building housing the data center itself a module.
In a blog posting on Tuesday, Microsoft detailed what the "generation four" data centers will look like.
"This is a significant step forward, and one that Microsoft believes will reshape how companies build data centers and support cloud computing," a Microsoft representative said in a statement.
The generation four concept "builds on the innovation at Microsoft's Chicago data center, which houses shipping containers packed with up to 2,500 servers each," the representative said. "A container facility helps ensure that we don't overbuild server capacity, while allowing the company to reduce the time to build a data center from 24 to 12 months."
The new approach goes a step further, building the center itself out of prefabricated mechanical, electrical, and security components, as well as the containerized servers. Such facilities can be deployed in just three to six months and expanded when demand grows.
Microsoft says the new approach will cut capital costs by 20 percent to 40 percent.
"In short, we are striving to bring Henry Ford's Model T factory to the data center," Microsoft's Mike Manos said in the blog posting. "We intend to have our components built in factories and then assemble them in one location (the data center site) very quickly. Think about how a computer, car or plane is built today."
For those that are in to data centers, check out the blog. it goes into just a ton of detail. I've also embedded a video that Microsoft did.
Meanwhile, I'm working on some separate posts for this week on some of the vendors that are powering Microsoft's efforts.
- prev
- 1
- next
