Where in the world are Microsoft's datacenters?
Microsoft is building out its datacenters and datacenter infrastructure at a rapid clip, as part of the company's stated mission to introduce a cloud version and/or cloud components of all of its existing software products.
While Microsoft does share some information about what's inside these datacenters, the company seldom provides an overview of its grand datacenter plan. That's why I was happy to get from one of my sources this slide (from November 2009), which shows where Microsoft has built and is building its Microsoft Online datacenters across the globe.
(Click on the slide below to enlarge.)
Microsoft's plan is to pair up datacenters for each geographic region, with one datacenter being designated as primary and the other, secondary, for disaster-recovery purposes. Microsoft was evaluating whether to put a primary datacenter in Brazil for the South American market, backed up by a North American datacenter.
According to this slide, Microsoft will be adding support for customers in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan in the coming months.
Microsoft Online -- or MS Online, as it is labeled at the top of this slide -- is the part of the company that develops and sells Microsoft-hosted offerings like the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS); the individual BPOS services (SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Office Communications Online and Live Meeting); Dynamics CRM Online; and forthcoming new services, like the BPOS-Lite product I wrote about earlier this year.
Update: Looks like things may have changed in terms of Microsoft's plans, since they created this slide in November 2009. Here's a statement from Kevin Timmons, general manager of Datacenter Operations:
“This is an outdated ‘vision’ slide which does not accurately reflect our existing or future datacenter plans. Datacenters represent a long-term business approach to meet future cloud services demands of customers. We have to consider multiple proposals from across our business groups to ensure we are making thoughtful, measured investments that are in line with our long-term business approach to meet future demand by pre-investing in a way that allows us to support future capacity incrementally in a cost-efficient manner.”
I'd interpret this as "don't expect this stuff to happen in April." It will be interesting to see how Microsoft's actual plans do compare to this slide, once they make the actual announcements (if they do).