Microsoft’s Cloud Server Engineer to Share Optimized Server Best Practices at Open Server Summit

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GFS, Staff Writer
Global Foundation Services

Servers represent an essential component in any datacenter operation. Once a datacenter is built, the servers and energy required to power them are the two largest recurring expenditures, and some datacenter operators aren't aware of this fact. Kushagra Vaid, General Manager for Server Engineering, will keynote at the Open Server Summit in San Francisco on October 24 to share how Microsoft optimizes its servers for cloud service delivery. Kushagra leads a team of engineers in Microsoft's Global Foundation Services (GFS) group that is responsible for the design of cloud servers running in Microsoft datacenters.

At Microsoft, we are making significant investments in server technologies as we continue to move away from a high-redundancy datacenter operational model to one where software becomes the primary form of scalability and availability. Our cloud-scale infrastructure is comprised of datacenters located around the world that deliver over 200+ services including Bing, Office 365, Skype, and the Windows Azure platform to more than 1 billion customers and 20 million businesses in 88 markets.  At that huge scale it is imperative that we design the infrastructure as an integrated system. Continuously making incremental improvements across the infrastructure has the potential to make a positive impact on our bottom-line, especially improvements in our server designs. 

During his speech, Vaid, who holds over 25 U.S. and international patents in the field of computer architecture and datacenter design, will examine the challenges associated with designing servers for a massive cloud-scale infrastructure. He'll discuss how a converged infrastructure requires engineering tradeoffs and how servers will evolve as new system architectures and technologies are introduced to manage cloud applications.

Held at the Santa Clara Convention from October 22-24, the Open Server Summit focuses on the design of next-generation servers and welcomes attendees from across the industry. If you're interested in attending the Summit,visit here to register. We look forward to sharing more about our experiences and datacenter operations best practices.