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May 8, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The first floor of Microsoft's (microsoft.com) new data center "container farm" in Chicago will be able to pack up to 300,000 servers, said a Microsoft executive at the Microsoft Management Summit last Friday in Las Vegas.
According to reports by Data Center Knowledge on Wednesday, Microsoft will be able to manage "extraordinarily dense server environments" by packing the 40-foot shipping containers with data center equipment.
In her keynote address at the Summit, Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft's corporate VP of Global Foundation Services, told the audience that Microsoft will move from 400 to 450 watts per square foot to 1,200 watts a square foot and showed a lot of enthusiasm about how "really, really cool" containers are.
Although Microsoft doesn't tend to discuss the number of of servers it operates overall, Chrapaty says its infrastructure is growing by 10,000 servers per month. Data Center Knowledge pointed out that, by way of comparison, the extremely popular social networking site Facebook currently has 10,000 servers powering its whole platform. Microsoft is, more or less, adding a Facebook's worth of servers to its network every month.
Despite its already aggressive growth, Chrapaty believes "Microsoft's growth will accelerate to 20,000 servers per month in the next several years," predominantly due to the company's use of customized data center containers, dubbed as "CBlox," which are designed to "handle higher power and server density."
Microsoft first announced its $500 million "container farm" data center in April, when it reported it would be moving 150 to 220 shipping containers filled with data center equipment into the 500,000 square foot facility in Chicago, making it the most significant public use of shipping container systems to date.
The company says it has already readied other centers across the US to be used in a similar fashion, as Microsoft continues to rival the massive facilities expansions of Google.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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