An artist rendering of Microsoft's new Dublin, Ireland data center.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) announced on Monday via its blog that it will open two new, Generation 3 mega data centers in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland, which will support the company’s “software-plus-services” strategy.
The Dublin facility will go live on July 1, followed by our Chicago facility on July 20 to support the company’s online, live, and cloud services.
The Dublin data center is the company’s first mega data center built outside of the United States. The building spans 303,000 square feet and currently has 5.4 mega watts of critical power.
The company says it will expand the data center over time to a total of 22.2MW of critical power, growing to meet its business and customer demand.
The data center makes extensive use of outside air economization to cool the facility year round, offering greater power efficiency and the reduction of its carbon footprint.
The Chicago facility spans over 700,000 square feet and has the critical power of 60MW. Phase 1 will offer 30MW of critical power with the rest pre-positioned for future growth.
Two-thirds of the Chicago data center is optimized for housing containerized servers and will help the company achieve a PUE yearly average of 1.22.
Microsoft says these prepackaged units, which hold up to 1,800 to 2,500 servers each, can be wheeled into the facility and made operational within hours.
Meanwhile, the density inside the containers can exceed 10 times that of traditional data centers.
This year has been a relatively slow one for Microsoft in terms of data center builds.
In January, the company announced it was postponing plans to construct a $500 million data center in West Des Moines, Iowa in light of the recession.
With the announcement of these two new major data centers, it looks as though the company has resumed its data center strategy once again.
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