What is the “The Cloud”?
It’s where remote learners and workers meet for virtual lessons and meetings, where gamers unite to develop worlds, race cars, and blast away opponents, and where healthcare practitioners keep track of COVID-19 patients and the resources they require to treat them.
It’s also where businesses respond to customers’ requests instantly and securely, and where companies simplify communications among dispersed staff and manage supply chain logistics for product portfolios.
But, what exactly is “the cloud”?
“It is not nebulous magic, nor is it a single supercomputer,” states a narrator in an introduction video to a new microsite that gives you a virtual tour of a Microsoft data center. “The cloud is a globally networked network of millions of computers in data centers worldwide that collaborate to store and manage data, execute applications, and distribute content and services.”
The company’s new virtual data center experience is an interactive digital tour of a typical Microsoft data center. The tour can be accessed via a personal computer or mobile device.
“It makes the cloud more real for people and less high-tech and highfalutin,” said Noelle Walsh, a Microsoft corporate vice president in charge of the company’s cloud infrastructure.
She went on to say that data centers are similar to houses in that they are structures with electrical and mechanical systems. To be sure, the Microsoft Cloud is on a different scale than any house and works with far greater dependability. The corporation currently manages more than 200 data centers, and that number is growing. To date, the company’s operational and planned data center footprint encompasses 34 countries worldwide, all connected by more than 165,000 miles of subsea, terrestrial, and metro optical fiber.
Additionally, Microsoft plans to add data centers in at least 10 more countries this year, and the company expects to develop between 50 and 100 new data centers every year for the foreseeable future, according to Walsh.
Visitors that visit the virtual data center experience learning about the infrastructure needed to construct data centers, the renewable energy that supports them, and the gear and software that secures data. The tour concludes with a glimpse of the future, involving servers kept cool in boiling liquid tanks and modular datacenters deployed on the seafloor in submarine-like tubes.
“Datacenters seem a lot cooler in movies and advertising,” Brian Janous, general manager of Microsoft’s datacenter energy strategy team, cautioned. “There aren’t many bells and whistles.” However, this is proof that they are optimized for efficiency. There’s a lot that isn’t immediately apparent.”
The majority of Microsoft datacenters are warehouse-sized, windowless combinations of concrete, steel, copper, and fiber encased in a fence. “If you went by a data center, you probably wouldn’t realize it was a data center,” Walsh said, adding that the simple appearance is intentional. “We don’t usually publicize where we are.”
The virtual data center experience is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the driver to hit the brakes, pause, and take a look around. According to Mark Russinovich, a Microsoft technical fellow and Azure’s chief technology officer, the high-security perimeter fence is one of many layers of physical protection in place to manage access into and out of the data center. In addition, there are security cameras and a guardhouse. Additional physical security measures upon admission include a check-in station where visitors display their credentials and a one-way door that stops anyone from bringing anything unauthorized into or out of the data center.
“You won’t see the backend monitoring of all those systems,” Russinovich said. “There’s automated monitoring looking for anomalies of who’s given access, automated monitoring of the video feeds.”
Visitors will also notice an array of electrical infrastructure required to power the data center from the outside. This contains at least two power lines fed into the electric power grid for backup if one line fails, as well as onsite backup generators to power the servers in the event of a power loss or other form of disturbance. The majority of Microsoft’s backup generators are currently diesel-powered; in the long run, the business intends to shift to low-carbon fuels, batteries, or hydrogen fuel cells.
Microsoft has committed to powering all of its data centers and operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Wind turbines and solar panels are shown as examples of the type of renewable energy the business is acquiring to achieve that objective in the virtual data center experience, while wind turbines and solar panels are rarely visible exactly adjacent to, or on top of, the company’s data centers.
“One question we are asked many times is, ‘Why don’t you put solar panels on your datacenters?’ ” Janous explained. “Because it would just be window decoration on what is a real problem we’re trying to solve, which is to expedite the decarbonization of the electric grid, and truthfully, putting solar panels on our data center would only be a drop in the bucket,” he explained.
While each data center has the land footprint of a big box department store, the type of business that could generate enough power with rooftop solar panels to meet peak power demand, “almost every square inch of the data center is utilized for moving electricity through servers, turning electricity into data.” Only 1 to 2% of the energy consumed in the data center could be met by a rooftop solar system, according to Janous.
Instead of installing rooftop solar panels, Microsoft engages in financial arrangements with power companies to construct wind and solar farms spanning thousands of acres of land. When possible, the company builds data centers near hydroelectric dams, which provide a consistent stream of green and dependable baseload power for data centers.
All of the servers inside the data center that convert energy into data generate heat as they operate, necessitating the use of a specialized cooling system to keep the servers from failing. Microsoft datacenters in temperate climates like the United States Except on the hottest days, the Pacific Northwest and Northern Europe use outside air to cool. Janous remarked that the same is true for hotter and more humid places of the world.
On the 15% of days when the temperature and humidity are above the threshold for air cooling, Microsoft’s mechanical coolers employ evaporation to cool the air. Microsoft is going toward waterless cooling technologies such as liquid cooling as a business, to replace more water than it consumes by the end of this decade.
Rows of server racks are often laid up in a hot aisle and cold aisle layout inside the data center. The cold aisle is blown with T-shirt-weather air, and it is broad enough for technicians to access individual servers for maintenance. Fans draw air from the cool aisle and blow it over the servers as they run. Hot air exits the back of the servers and enters the hot aisle, where it is sucked up and out of the data center and cycled through the mechanical coolers.
All of Microsoft’s data center electrical and mechanical infrastructure keeps the company’s more than 4 million servers in data centers around the world running with “five nines” of reliability, or 99.999% of the time, according to Walsh.
“The server is the precious part,” she said.
Maintaining the security and privacy of the data stored and processed inside the data center is equally important, according to Russinovich. According to him, Microsoft spends more than $1 billion per year on data center security, which includes hardware, software, protocols, and employees.
“You’ll see best practices from physical access to the data center to the handling of media to even the way the data is stored on the devices because software is encrypting the data before it lands on the devices,” he said.
Data is deleted from outdated media drives as servers are upgraded, and the drives are sometimes physically shredded to ensure the data is removed.
“We’re also encrypting the data so that even if there was an issue with something getting out, it’s still not going to be accessible,” Russinovich added.
To reach carbon and water sustainability goals while also meeting the demand for faster, more powerful data center servers, Microsoft research and engineering teams are focusing on the data center of the future. According to Russinovich, the pace of change over the next five years is likely to outpace the pace of change during the previous 20 years.
More efficient, high-bandwidth networks, for example, will enable large-scale AI applications as well as the transport of vast volumes of data, he said.
These speedy and efficient data centers will be made possible by advancements such as the liquid cooling and underwater data center concepts revealed at the virtual data center experience’s final destination. According to Walsh, these technologies enable more tightly packed servers and open the way for new software and hardware architectures suited for low-latency, high-powered AI applications.
These densely packed servers may also pave the way for a new breed of data centers dedicated to edge applications. Nonetheless, the hyper-scale Microsoft data centers that the company is currently developing and plans to create soon will remain a significant part of the mix, according to Russinovich.
“The hyper-scale regions will probably still remain large just because the cloud demand will continue to grow,” he said.
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