Microsoft builds out its first containerized datacenter

James Hamilton, one of the all-star architects on the Microsoft Windows Live Core team, has been a champion of using modular datacenter containers to build out datacenters.

On April 1, Microsoft announced publicly its plans to build a completely containerized production data center. The company made the announcement at the Data Center World show. The Microsoft containerized datacenter facility will be in the Chicago area (Northlake, Ill.).

Hamilton detailed Microsoft's announcement on his external blog:

"The Microsoft Chicago facility is a two floor design where the first floor is a containerized design housing 150 to 220 40’ containers each 1,000 to 1,000 servers. Chicago is large facility with the low end of the ranges Mike (Manos who leads the Microsoft Global Foundations Data Center team) quoted yielding 150k serves and the high end running to 440k servers. If you assume 200W/server, the critical load would run between 30MW and 88MW for the half of the data center that is containerized.  If you assume a PUE of 1.5, we can estimate the containerized portion of the data center at between 45MW and 132MW total load. It’s a substantial facility."

Microsoft isn't the only one testing these kinds of shipping-container-based datacenter configurations, Hamilton noted. Rackable Systems and Sun Microsystems announced such a solution, with Rackable shipping the first production container, which included more than 1,000 servers, Hamilton noted. Other vendors shipping modular, container-based datacenter solutions include IBM, Dell and Verari, Hamilton blogged.