Those are, as The Next Platform has said many times, some big numbers and ones that make Microsoft a player, by default, in the cloud. Amazon has to support more than 1 million users of its public cloud as well as the Amazon retail business, and Facebook has to support the 1.7 billion users on its social network and the expanding number of services and data types they make use of as they connect.įor Microsoft, the buildout of its Azure cloud is driven by growth in its online services such as the Bing search engine, the Skype communications, the Xbox 360 gaming, and the Office 365 office automation tools, and others that add up to over 200 cloud-based services that are used by more than 1 billion users at more than 20 million businesses worldwide. While search continues to dominate at Google, it is now building out a slew of services and moving aggressively into the public cloud to take on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. The Google search engine was arguably the first hyperscale application in the world, if you do not count some of the signal processing and data analytics performed by US intelligence agencies and the military. But Microsoft did tell us a lot about how it is thinking about the harmony between servers, storage, and networking and the configuration of the facilities that keep them up and running.Įach of the hyperscalers has been pushed to the extremes of scale by different customer sets and application demands, and over different time horizons. Rick Bakken, datacenter evangelist for Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure and Operations team, was our tour guide, and as you might imagine, we were not allowed to take any pictures or make any recordings inside the several generations of datacenters at the facility, which is undergoing a massive expansion to keep up with the explosive growth of the online services that Microsoft supplies and that are increasingly deployed on the same infrastructure that is used to underpin the Azure public cloud. Ahead of the launch of Windows Server at its Ignite conference, Microsoft invited The Next Platform to visit its Quincy facilities and a history lesson of sorts in datacenter design, demonstrating how Microsoft has innovated and become one of the biggest of the hyperscalers in the world, rivaling Google and Amazon Web Services – companies that are its main competition in the public cloud business. There are five different datacenter operators in this small farming community of around 7,000 people, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Intuit, Sabey Data Centers, and Vantage Data Centers, and they have located there thanks to the proximity of Quincy to hydroelectric power generated from the Columbia River and the relatively cool and arid climate, which can be used to great advantage to keep servers, storage, and switches cool.Īll of the datacenter operators are pretty secretive about their glass houses, but every once in a while, just to prove how smart they are about infrastructure, one of them opens up the doors to let selected people inside. If you want to study how datacenter design has changed over the past two decades, a good place to visit is Quincy, Washington.
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