Miichael Manos Keynote at Data Center World

The Michael Manos keynote this morning at Data Center World was inspiring. Michael doesn't read off of note cards and you can tell that he not only knows this material inside and out, but that he is passionate about it. I gained a number of things from this talk -- including him mentioning that their new Chicago facility will have upwards of 200 shipping containers pieced together like the RV campsites like I have talked about in previous posts.

Here are my notes from his talk:

• Microsoft challenges: 15x growth on servers, 9x growth on egress, 15x growth on power, 3x growth on number of data centers.
• 30% of the audience had active programs to monitor and measure power in their data center
• Next to nobody in the audience knew what their carbon emissions were for their data center
• Sustainability regulation 'is' coming ; not if, but when
• How many are working on green programs? 30% (audience)
• Industry challenges/minefields:

1. sustainability reporting & efficiency reporting
2. data center inventory globally becoming a challenge
3. increasing power densities at the rack level
4. power costs
5. green-washing
6. expertise shortage
7. organizational structures
8. increasing capital cost barriers
9. innovation hoarding
10. heterogeneity versus homogeneity mindsets.

• The 'old' power draw was 4kW / rack ; now is 8-12 kW / rack ; some implementations 36kW / rack
• $11-$18mil for a tier2 / tier2+ data center
• Cost of a data center:
• 82% construction costs : mechanical/electrical
• land: 2%, core&shell cost 9%, architectural: 7%
• 40,000 to 80,000 systems inside a typical 500,000 sq ft data center
• Staffing at a Microsoft data center: 35 people across 24x7x365 shifts.
• Boarding process: trucks pull up with pre-populated racks, drive into colo room, connect and go
• Driving automation is key ; have to have good operational practices.
• 35 factors for site selection. Including: Internet population, Internet peering/network, mobile users, power pricing, power capacity, environmental, construction costs, tax climate, IT labor availability, corporate citizenship -- this gives them their composite heat map. Quincy wasn't necessarily an ideal site until they went to the county level on a second pass and determined its benefits.
• Metrics: PUE vs DCIE : Microsoft uses both ; dcie shows the overhead ; goal, for either is ONE
• Microsoft sets aggressive pue targets internally.; they try to half the distance to a PUE goal by one every two years.
• Scribe (their software tool) ; shows/measures PUE, DCIE, total racks, total servers, kW power consumed, critical load power, etc.
• They have 1 million points to monitor/measure across data centers
• They have been measuring PUE for 4+ years ; an old data center of theirs started at 2.4 PUE and is at 1.9'ish in aug. 2007 ; very little if any capital improvements in this data center -- all driven by operational efficiencies.
• Chicago - their FIRST container data center!
• Entire first floor is full of containers ; each container houses 1,000 to 2,000 systems per container ; 150 - 220 containers on the first floor
• Containers are parked at 45 degree angle ; due to trucks parking them
• They build 'spines' of systems that connect power/cooling/bandwidth to their containers