GreenITStrategy.com

Posting a quick one today while I am sitting at home with the flu (urgghhhh - its not the swine flu though!).  I hope you are all feeling better than I am at this point and if any of this doesn't make sense I hope you'll forgive me.

Daniel Costello, Director of data center Services at Microsoft, has posted an interesting 2-part entry on the Global Foundation Services (GFS) Team Blog - starting with how they defined the challenges of their extensive data center deployment, and continuing today with a post focussing on how the engineers went about challenging the status quo.

Excerpt:

"Often the application of technology involves as much innovation as the technology itself. Rather than reinvent the wheel we looked at our industry's journey thus far. We started by questioning everything up to and including the roof and the very definition of a data center. With a lot of prior art in modularization, some of which has already been applied to the IT industry, we saw a good fit. The military has been deploying portable ground stations with IT servers and communications equipment for decades. And for some time now telecom companies have deployed pre-manufactured buildings which are then assembled on site as central offices.

As part of our design project we met to discuss the modular solution space with a group of folks from our Infrastructure Services team within GFS , including members of our hardware, data center operations, development, engineering, risk management, and security teams, as well as our internal product groups. (The original Gen 4.0 team from the two-day session is 100 percent intact and still working at Microsoft, by the way.) We knew we could modularize the server room, which we now call Server PACs. The challenge became how to modularize the entire facility. So we created other PACs: Generator PACS, Medium Voltage Switchgear PACs, UPS PACs, etc. Next, we developed the system electrical one-line diagrams and mechanical schematics for our four data center classes."

Full article here..http://blogs.technet.com/msdatacenters/