BBC Tours Inside Microsoft’s Quincy Data Center

Here is a BBC Video inside Microsoft’s Quincy Data Center.

The online article is here.

The town in the cloud...

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 27 Oct 08, 09:15 GMT

I'm in the United States to report on several stories, including the whole phenomenon of cloud computing. More on that on the television and radio on Tuesday, but in the meantime, let me take you to one of the places we've filmed, the town with its head in the cloud.

We've been to Quincy, a remote farming town of 5,000 inhabitants in the middle of the state of Washington, where just about the only activities until recently were either planting potatoes or turning them into chips - or rather French fries. Now it's home to three giant data centres.

The biggest belongs to Microsoft, which completed its brutally ugly building on a former bean-field last year, to be followed swiftly by Yahoo and now the financial software firm Intuit. We were allowed access to Microsoft's centre - the first TV crew to get inside - and after passing through several layers of security found ourselves in one of the server rooms.

There are 10 of them, with up to 30,000 servers in each, an almost unimaginable amount of computing power. Walking around, deafened by the roar from the cooling systems needed to keep the computers chilled, you feel you're right in the belly of the modern internet.

Oh yeh thanks to Steve Clayton’s: geek in disguise blog I found this post.

Comments

[tinkthank]

I love all the hoopla Dell is making about powering the new Microsoft properties yet all the video of this datacenter shows Rackable deployments.