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Microsoft Predicts Cloud Computing Will Burst With Growth, Opportunity
Greg Burns/Chicago Tribune
October 13, 2009
In a city known for its architecture, it must be the most boring $500 million building around – on the outside, that is.
Microsoft Corp.‘s new data center in suburban Chicago shows the blandest face possible: bare warehouse walls, behind some serious security fences.
Inside, however, this dull structure could hold the future of computing.
Within a decade, if Microsoft is guessing right, practically all data and software will be run from buildings like this one.
Unremarkable facades will house servers by the thousands, providing vast amounts of processing power and storage capacity available to all comers through the Internet. Instead of managing systems of their own, government agencies, companies and millions of individuals will tap into a one-stop shop for their digital needs.
This is the promise of so-called cloud computing, and Microsoft has made Chicago one of only a few global hubs.
For now, caution prevails. Customers have begun to embrace the cloud but remain wary about security, reliability and giving up control. The competition is hot from arch-rival Google Inc.. And nearly every tech giant from IBM Corp. to Yahoo Inc. has a cloud strategy in mind.
Microsoft expects that economies of scale will make all the difference. Done right, the cloud could cut information technology costs so much that corporate IT departments become practically obsolete.
“How do we completely change the game?” asked Christian Belady, a leading Microsoft infrastructure engineer. “What if the cost could be one-tenth?”
It can be, but it takes a massive investment to wring out those costs – an investment on display in the nondescript data center just off the Tri-State Tollway in Northlake.
Microsoft runs its operation with just 45 workers, including security guards and janitors. Only three work directly for the company.
Its servers arrive by tractor-trailer in ordinary-looking shipping containers, pre-packed with thousands of high-powered computers stacked together, ready to plug and play. Putting them online takes a matter of hours from arrival at the receiving door.
The company has engineered every inch of the 707,000-square-foot facility for maximum efficiency. Belady specializes in power, and the center requires a lot of it. One reason for the location in Chicago – besides a nexus of the nation’s fiber-optic telecommunication lines – is the immediate availability of 30 megawatts, with the capacity to double it.
Yet Belady is looking to use less and less. He’s tinkering with hardware that tolerates a wide temperature range, chillers that pull from the outside when it’s cold and servers containing no individual fans, since bigger air handlers work better. Almost everything is measured and monitored electronically, enabling a customer to report exactly the carbon emissions related to their computing, for instance.
“When you build data centers this large, you are absolutely the lowest-cost provider of computing power,” noted Toan Tran, an equity research analyst at Chicago’s Morningstar Inc. “I think the cloud definitely happens. This is a big trend that gets adopted. The cost savings is just tremendous.”
The risk for Microsoft is moving to this new platform while protecting its Windows and Office franchise and fending off the competing Google Apps. It remains vulnerable to the downturn in the global PC business, and the jury’s out on its Bing search engine, as well as the coming Windows 7 operating system and Office 2010.
Tran believes the product to watch is Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform. In a decade, he predicts, “We expect Windows and Office to be empty shells and for the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue and profits to come from Azure.”
That will mean changes in data centers, too, and Belady foresees a new generation of modular, prefabricated units that can be rapidly deployed wherever demand dictates.
If the cost structure allows it, he said, “What we see is growth continuing … and relatively rapid development.”
© 2009, YellowBrix, Inc._
