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Microsoft Plans $500 Million Chicago Data Center
miller60 writes "Microsoft is planning a huge new data center in the Chicago area, as it continues to expand its Internet infrastructure in an effort to keep pace with Google in web-based services. The new facility in Northlake, Ill. may cost more than $500 million and is expected to span 440,000 square feet. Microsoft opened a 470,000 square foot data center in Quincy, Washington earlier this year, and is building a similar facility in San Antonio. Microsoft has also submitted plans for a $500 million data center campus in Dublin, Ireland."
Please describe how many LOC (libraries of congress) the data center will store. Also give the area in football fields and heights in statue of liberty and the energy consumption in number of homes that could be lit up.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Great, more work for the IT folk in Chicago. The Quincy data center has created employment for 1200 persons... Not a bad thing.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
The big challenge is going to be getting NetBEUI to work between all those locations.
Just make sure you reinforce the concrete walls with titanium. ;-)
Will it be running Linux?
My faith is expressed through Nihilism. Do you understand?
If not, Microsoft is going to be hard pressed to match Google in performance, however much money they throw at the problem.
What was the reasoning behind Chicago? I'm not saying that Chicago is a bad choice but it would seem to me that there are better choices. The reason I would not put Chicago on top of the list of places is infrastructure. During the last few summer, Chicago was one of the cities that experienced rolling black outs because their electric grid couldn't handle the load. Also Chicago has hard winters which could cause disruptions during those months. And then you have the initial cost of building in Chicago. Land in Chicago, like most cities, isn't cheap. I don't know much about Google's data centers but their centers seem to have several things in common: cheap land and abundant electricity.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
big men, inserting chairs into things, turning them... and adjusting them! :)
No, just kidding, i bet that this new center will cut the development of the log off module from 9 months to 8.
great investment
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440,000 square feet? Anyone else surprised that these data centers aren't 640K square feet?
More likely, needed to handle the DRM and spyware in Vista.
These minimum system requirements to run Vista are really getting ridiculous. ;)
Data thieves don't screw around in Chicago and MS isn't exactly synonymous with "security."
I wonder how many armed guards they are planning to employ.
I thought they released that in 1995?!?
Now if they just could have any useful services. Competing with google will take much more than increasing bandwidth and processing power. Current services that try their utmost to tie into the desktop just plain sucks. It should be the other way around.
HTTP/1.1 400
Due to a shortage of skilled workers in Ireland, the Dublin data center will be partially staffed by leprechauns...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
guess they don't want to miss any of that pron! ;~|
Microsoft's just upgrading its disk space so it has enough room to install the next version of its OS.
Anyone got some real comparison numbers ?
Does that include the cost of Windows licenses?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Dunno why but this strange thought just popped into my head...
The Cold War of the second half of the 20th century was ultimately won by the US because the USSR couldn't keep up with the financial strain of building and maintaining such a huge military. The US basically outspent the USSR.
I wonder if we're seeing a similar thing happening between Google & MS. Back in the 80's & 90's MS was on top of the world and in control of virtually everything computer related. Their focus, however, wasn't on internet technologies until the late 90's when the first internet bubble hit. Google, on the other hand, started in the heyday of the bubble and focused entirely on the internet. Now MS is pouring tons of cash into internet projects in an effort to compete against Google since they see Google as their biggest competitive threat. MS has to deal with a dominant OS, Office products, MSN, and other products/services that they've built and acquired over the years, on top of their internet offerings. Google, on the other hand, is just focusing on the internet. I wonder if MS will eventually find that it has overextended itself by investing too much in competing with Google, and if that will end up eventually hurting them financially in a manner similar to the way the USSR went bankrupt trying to keep up with the US. It may not happen for many years, but I wonder if that's what we'll eventually see.
Just like those huge nuclear waste dumps, yet another place you dont want do go.
From TFA:
"Microsoft has been keenly focused on power costs in its data center site location efforts. While 5 cents per kilowatt hour is in the midrange of average state-by-state power costs, it is lower than rates found near many major data center markets such as California (9 cents per kWh) or northern New Jersey (11 center per kWh)." Commonwealth Edison also generates around most of its power from nuclear reactors, making the location carbon friendly on that basis.
Sources of Electricity Supplied Percentage of Total for the 12 months ending September 30,2006
Biomass power 1%
Coal-fired power 4%
Hydro Power 0%
Natural gas-fired power 0%
Nuclear power 92%
Oil-fired power 0%
Solar power 0%
Wind power 0%
Other resources 0%
Unknown resources purchased from other companies 3%
TOTAL 100%
As noted in some other comments, Chicago also is :
(a) 3rd largest metro area in the US and largest in the Midwest
(b) a major rail hub - much fiber was laid on railroad rights of way in the go-go 90s
(c) notoriously corrupt, so it's likely Microsoft will receive massive tax subsidies that will reduce its costs
And I've lived in Chicago all my life and can't identify any "rolling blackouts" recently. ComEd had infrastructure problems with ancient cabling in the city proper 10-12 years ago during a very hot summer (as do many older cities). The main issue Chicagoans have with ComEd is with its recently raised residential rates, which were jacked up 20% despite record profits for ComEd and its parent, Exelon. This is thanks to the notoriously corrupt politics of the great state of Illinois as a whole.
Are these datacentres going to be cube shaped, ala the Borg?
Microsoft could be competing with the aluminum smelters as our largest consumer of electricity. It's nice to see that they are doing their part to keep things exciting in the foreign energy market.
Millions of queries each second, answers have to be trolled out of billions of cached files. Low thread/process count to dedicate. Feasible? No.
i don't know if anyone else knows the area, but northlake is not the cleanest or best neighborhood. it will be difficult enough staffing the facility with the notoriously underperforming schools in the area, but there really isn't a decent place for someone who makes a decent salary to get lunch.
Sorry but in the online service wars that pit MS against anyone else, always bet on anyone else. MS I'm afraid is never up to the task and frankly they never seem eager enough to succeed. For Google - online IS their business. For MS, online is a diversion they pour a few billion of their parked cash into. If MS is building two DCs for 1.2 billion dollars (the actual figure are 600 per not 500) total then it's a placeholder. Intel thought they would get into the outsourcing business in 1999 and spent 1 billion 1999 dollars building one commercial DC. Which they quickly shutdown. By comparison, Google spent $600 million for one satellite DC in Lenoir NC last year. It's not even a major hub.
Why is Microsoft needing a data center? Don't they design Windows and Office in some offices in Redmond? Seems like a misplacement of core values as a company.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
OK, so they have several 0.5billion$ facilities around the USA and the world. MS can afford that easily, what with a warchest of 40-45 billion. BUT... how much will this cost MS in the long run? Those computers need maintenance, and so do the facilities, and the salaries of the employees there don't just grow on trees. And then there's a bit of electricity being transformed into Joule heat.
Hmm... I have absolutely no idea, but I guess it could be several tens of millions/year.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Well, if MS base their data centres on Windows, then their costs will be at least double that of Google and more like 5 to 10 times more. So a $500M MS data centre is actually quite small, compared to a $500M Google data centre.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
A more useful analogy would be how many flying chairs can be housed in the building.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Once again Microsoft is pushing an untested Operating System into service as a server, with this poorly-planned Windows 95-based data center.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
It'll run Vista, but not very quickly with Aero turned on.
in an open letter to François Bancilhon, MS announced that while it had already spent the $500M on Windows licenses, the Nigerian guy in the Purchasing Dept had decided to ditch that idea. They mentioned that they would now be running a Beowulf cluster of Classmate PCs preinstalled with Mandriva Linux instead. *managed to take fit in two favored topics....now if only there was a way to somehow get Natalie Portman, hot grits and CowboyNeal in on this*
Coal? Burning natural gas?
At least Google got near some hydroelectric power up northwest....
. . .why are they putting so much money into Windows 95?
"If your parents never had children, chances are you wonât either." -Dick Cavett
They signed a series of expensive coal contracts in the 70's (western low sulfur coal) and got burned... big time. Hence... when the gov't came around and asked for volunteers for nuclear power - they jumped on it just to get out of the BAD business decision that was made. Don't think for a second it was because of concerns for the environment.
Oh my. Is Microsoft buying up false floor to track Google's expansion into data centre space, on speculation that Google will use it for something Microsoft will need to compete with? As soon as Microsoft finds out what Google is buying up data centres for, that is. Which will probably happen after Google figures out what to do with their own acquisitions. It's a huge amount of data centre investment, and I think Cringley has been tracking the speculation.
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