If you would like to know what a Microsoft datacenter looks like then just take a look at this video which includes details of the unit in Ireland recently hit by an outage due to a thunderstorm.

It doesn't matter if you are a software guy there is a fascination in how the big datacenters actually work to support all the cloud apps you might create. Microsoft, perhaps in an attempt not to be quite so sidelined by Google and Amazon, has released a video showing the data centers that it uses to run the Azure cloud among other things. You can also see details of the Irish datacenter that was shut down recently due to a thunderstorm.

Microsoft claimed at the opening of the center that the cool Irish air would make keeping the plant cool. Microsoft International president Jean-Philippe Courtois said:

“We love the Irish weather.. The cool climate of Dublin was a very important consideration for us.”

I bet they are not so keen on Irish weather now.

The video is a bit too much of a promo, too many comparisons to football fields,  but in places it has some interesting views of how it all works and how things have evolved over each generation of datacenters. The move to placing hardware into containers so modularizing the entire system seems to be the reason that it is all so much greener now that it was. You also just have to admire the use of the term "plug-and-play" when applied to huge server modules that do indeed plug together to build a modern datacenter.

The real puzzle is that with all this backup, UPS, generators - why were there recent (7th August 2011) Microsoft and Amazon datacenter shut downs in Ireland just because of a thunderstorm?

The real puzzle is that with all this backup, UPS, generators - why were there recent Microsoft and Amazon datacenter shut downs in Ireland just because of a thunderstorm?

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