Microsoft set to 'turn on' new Washington datacenter

Microsoft is getting ready to open its Quincy, Wash., datacenter in early 2011, and is planning to also "turn on" two other new datacenters in the coming year.

According to January 4 "MS Datacenters" blog post, the Quincy datacenter is built around some of the concepts Microsoft pioneered in its Dublin and Chicago facilities. But it also is adding some new infrastructural twists. It will make use of pre-assembled components (PACs) across the entire facility, incorporating modular electrical, mechanical, server and security "building blocks." This design will better allow Microsoft to build out its datacenters as capacity needs grow, said Kevin Timmons, General Manager of Datacenter Services, in the post.

"Our modular design enables us to build a facility in significantly less time while reducing capital costs by an average of 50 to 60 percent over the lifetime of the project," Timmons blogged.

Phase 1 of the new Quincy datacenter will be located adjacent to next to the existing 500,000-square-foot facility Microsoft already operates in Quincy. The new building will look like a tractor shed, Timmons said, and will be "virtually transparent to ambient outdoor conditions, "allowing us to essentially place our servers and storage outside in the cool air while still protecting it from the elements."

Microsoft is preparing to open new modular datacenters later in 2011 in Virginia and Iowa.

Microsoft nearly pulled its datacenter out of Quincy a year ago, due to tax concerns, temporarily halting new construction there.

One more (tangentially) related Quincy note: There's a Microsoft technology codenamed "Quincy," which is a scheduler for distributed clusters. That "Quincy" is part of Microsoft's Dryad family of technologies, which Microsoft in late 2010 made available to external testers in prepration for final delivery in the latter half of 2011.