Microsoft Receives Leaders Award for Innovation in the Mega Data Centre

by Kevin Timmons,

General Manager of Datacenter Services

Global Foundation Services, Microsoft Corporation

This week our team was honored to receive the Datacentre Leaders Award 2009 for Innovation in the Mega Data Centre category for our new Dublin facility by Data Center Dynamics magazine.

 “We’re honored to receive this award, which recognizes the environmental sustainability approaches of our recently opened mega datacentre in Dublin. This facility takes a fresh approach in integrating new design solutions to achieve greater efficiencies and waste reductions, deviating from more traditional methods used in many current facilities today.” (from Declan Comerford, datacenter architect)

Back in September 2009 we opened the doors to our Dublin datacenter, the first mega facility dedicated to Microsoft in EMEA. The expansion in Dublin was a part of the company’s long term business approach to meet future demand by pre-investing in a way that would allow us to support future capacity in an incremental, cost effective manner. With the launch of our strategy for Software-plus-Services it was well understood that our datacenters would have to grow to support customer needs and demands worldwide. But we are not only committed to the idea of datacenters serving as a backbone of our services strategy, we are also committed to creating facilities that will continue deliver technical innovations and greater sustainability to the industry.

“This data centre represents a major milestone in our ongoing investment in Europe, providing the critical infrastructure to support the delivery of our next generation of online services for both businesses and consumers.” (from John Dwyer, international datacenter manager)

The 300,000+ square foot Dublin facility takes a fresh approach to design by integrating some unconventional and localized design solutions to support greater efficiency, deviating from more traditional methods used in many current facilities today. Some of these include:

1. The use of free air-cooling makes our Dublin facility the first large scale implementation of its kind in the region. This design shows what is possible when you innovate locally and build to suit the natural environmental benefits around you. It has also enabled us to validate several new design concepts for use in future facilities.

2. Removal of water based chillers and CRAC units has allowed us to reduce the water consumption to approx 1 percent of that used in similar sized facilities.

3. From an operations standpoint, our ability to mix server densities within the server room PODs, has allowed us to further maximize the critical power available in the facility.

We also went to great lengths to ensure that we “future-proofed” this facility as much as practically possible. Our team of electrical and mechanical design engineers created an asset which is able to accommodate a wide range of applications and power densities. This design approach ensures that the Dublin facility will continue to be a core piece of Microsoft’s computing infrastructure for many years to come.

Once again, we are deeply appreciative to have received this recognition for the efforts of a lot of team members who build and manage Microsoft’s production datacenters. 

If you would like to learn more about our datacenter best practices, I invite you to explore the other blogs on this site by my fellow colleagues and to download our white papers, news, and information available on our external web site at www.globalfoundationservices.com

/kt