Microsoft comes a long way with Water use in Quincy, Transfers water treatment plant to City of Quincy

When Microsoft's Quincy data center opened, I was able to get a tour of the data center.  One of the questions I asked is how much water does the data center use.  I asked the data center operations staff, they didn't know.  I asked the data center design team, they didn't know either.  And, a response was why do you want to know?  Because I think you use lots of water, and it is an issue in a green data center.

When I went back out to the data center a few months later, the data center operation team said they are storing blow-down water in tanks, and they have 6 months before the tanks fill up.  This problem was not unique to Microsoft as other data center operators had blow-down water that cannot be put into the waste stream.

A water treatment plant was built to reduce the environmental impact.  And now, Microsoft has put a plan in place to transfer the water treatment plant to the City of Quincy.

Microsoft’s Data Center Takes Fresh Approach On Water Reuse

13 Oct 2011 10:00 AM

Today we are transferring our $ multi-million water treatment plant to city of Quincy, WA

By: Christian Belady, General Manager of Data Center Advanced Development

Around the globe, water is becoming a scarcer and more valuable commodity, and that’s an important factor for data center operators and cloud service providers to consider as consumers and businesses aggressively adopt cloud-based computing. It’s even more critical that all of us in the industry make sure that beyond building sustainability into our designs, running data centers to higher standardize efficiencies, and measuring impact constantly, that we are helping the industry at large in thinking out of the box.

Today offers one of those opportunities. In Quincy, Washington, we are taking steps to transfer the operations of our Water Treatment Plant, located on our data center site, to the City of Quincy. This project involves innovative agreements for promoting a long term sustainable use of a limited natural resource, water, in a desert area that has the added benefit of supporting the foundation of Quincy and Grant County’s growing economy for years to come. To my knowledge, it is the first known transfer of a water treatment plant to a municipality in our industry and I would like to share why I think this type of collaborative project helps the industry and environment benefit as a whole.


Microsoft’s Quincy, Washington Water Treatment Plant

Google's Joe Kava discussed water use in data centers in its 2009 data center summit.  Joe's presentation on water start at the 9:20 mark.

A green data center has smart water use in addition to efficient power and cooling systems.

Don't make the mistake Lotus did, betting against the adoption of new technology, Win3.1

A long time ago, almost 20 years ago, Microsoft was launching Win3.1 while the dominant installed base was MS-DOS.   Win3.0 had done OK, but much of the installed base of apps were DOS apps.  Microsoft was trying to get developers to write Windows apps.  One of those companies who dragged their heals to create Windows app was Lotus 123.  So, when Windows 3.1 shipped you could run Lotus 123 in DOS mode or you could run another spreadsheet not as popular, but had been ported from the Mac to Windows, called Microsoft Excel.  Microsoft Excel became the spreadsheet app to use on Win3.1.  And, Lotus 123 never recovered its #1 spreadsheet market on the PC.

Amazon has launched Kindle Fire and there are companies like Netflix that will drag their heals to port their applications to the Amazon Kindle Fire.  Just because an app is dominant on Android marketplace or Apple app store doesn't mean the Kindle Fire users will wait for the port to eventually show up.

Just like when the PC was having the battle between CP/M, DOS, and Windows operating system frustrating developers.  The battle is between Google, Apple, and Amazon.

We'll see who wins and loses if Amazon Kindle Fire is a winner.

Microsoft Deploys Samsung's Green RAM in Technology Center, demonstrating Performance and Energy Efficient Private Clouds

Back when Mike Manos worked at Microsoft the both of us went to a Microsoft Technology Conference in Barcelona and met Frank Koch, one of the early believers in Green Data Centers.  It's been four years since Frank made the early efforts, and I just saw this press release between Microsoft and Samsung.

Microsoft and Samsung Collaborate to Enable Optimized Performance and Power Efficiency for Server Systems

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Frank Koch, infrastructure architect and Green IT lead of Microsoft Germany summarizes the joint efforts: "The world notices a dramatic increase of energy usage in data centers with more and more people leveraging their IT and moving to a private cloud. With the innovative memory modules from Samsung, we do not only measure higher throughput and performance for our hyper-v cloud solutions but a lower power consumption of the involved server systems, too. This is a great win-win situation for everyone."

The specific power savings was 15% for a 30 watt per system decrease.

Samsung's 30nm-class Green DDR3 was tested in eight gigabyte registered dual inline memory modules, installed on server systems running virtualized environments with the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system. They delivered power conservation levels of up to 15 percent for a 30-watt per system decrease, compared to systems using 50nm-class DDR3.

This gives a good reason to reach out to Frank and get more specifics on the energy efficiency projects he is working on.

Microsoft expands Data Center Capacity in Dublin and Virginia

Data Center locations are kept secret by many, but what is harm of the public knowing where a company has its data centers?  You can create many scenarios where you can worry about worst case scenarios.  But, one good side of sharing where your data center sites are located is it mproves your relationship with the local community.  When Google first built the Dalles data center, multiple people including the local officials were held to confidentiality agreements.  Contrast that with Google openly discussing its latest data center in Hamina with sea water cooling.

Microsoft's Dublin data center was disclosed by gov't officials.

According to an Irish business news report, Microsoft is planning to spend millions of euros expanding its two-year-old US$500m data center in Dublin by more than a third.

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At the opening of the data center, then Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen said he believed that in the future companies would rely on cloud-based delivery models, emphasizing the importance of large scale investments in infrastructure services such as those seen by Microsoft in Ireland.

Microsoft's Virginia Data center expansion had local officials disclosing details.

Microsoft plans $150 million expansion in Mecklenburg
September 23, 2011 1:29 PM

Microsoft Corp. plans to expand its data center in Mecklenburg County, creating 10 new jobs.

The company’s $499 million investment last year created 50 jobs and represented the largest economic investment in Southern Virginia. The expansion will increase the data center’s cloud infrastructure and services capacities.

Microsoft will spend $150 million to build a new facility at its site.

“Securing this state-of-the-art data center was an important win for the commonwealth, and additional growth will further establish Virginia as an Information Technology leader,” Gov. Bob McDonnell said in a statement.

With Google and Microsoft relaxing its data center location disclosures of site location, the benefits of disclosure look like they are winning vs. secrecy.  Facebook's Open Compute Project is another example of openness and disclosure.

Dell Modular Data Center Tour running Microsoft Bing Maps

Barton George has a post of Dell’s Ty Schmitt and Mark Bailey giving a tour of Dell’s modular data center in Longmont, CO running Bing Maps.

A Walk-through of Dell’s Modular Data Center

In my last entry I featured a video with the Bing Maps imagery team. In it they talked about why they went with Dell’s Modular Data Center (MDC) to help power and process all the image data they crunch. For a deeper dive and a look at one of these babies from the inside join Ty Schmitt and Mark Bailey in the following video as they walk you through the MDC and how it works.

Here is the YouTube video of the tour.