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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.
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The big challenge is going to be getting NetBEUI to work between all those locations.
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.
440,000 square feet? Anyone else surprised that these data centers aren't 640K square feet?
It will be protected by Itanium walls and a ChairLauncher which can launch at a rate of 40 standard Ballmers per minute.
Due to a shortage of skilled workers in Ireland, the Dublin data center will be partially staffed by leprechauns...
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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.
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.