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Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Nov 26, 2007 09:20 AM
from the so-many-jokes dept.
from the so-many-jokes dept.
miller60 writes "Microsoft has announced plans to build a data center in Siberia. The facility near the city of Irkutsk will be able to hold 10,000 servers. Officials in Microsoft's Russian business unit said the region had a stable power supply, and will be able to support a 50 megawatt utility feed. The average winter temperature is below zero in Irkutsk (which is perhaps best known to gamers as a territory in Risk). Microsoft recently announced huge data center projects in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland, and is clearly ramping up its worldwide infrastructure platform as it competes with Google." No doubt this will save a fortune on cooling costs- they can just crack a window.
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Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Crack a window? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Data security? (Score:4, Insightful)
Additionally, recall that last year Russia and Georgia withheld Gas to western europe in an after the fact, gun to the head, negotiation to raise prices. There are no so abundant gas resources that it is so fungible that one can switch suppliers. The same is true of data centers. Will some future event cause Siberia to turn off the Internet router and demand more money?
Parent
It's a big risk, but... (Score:4, Funny)
From Irkutsk you can strike Mongolia, Kamchatka, Siberia, or Yakutsk.
Personally, I found holding all of Australia was the key to taking Asia.
Parent
In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
This is where Google defectors will go... (Score:5, Funny)
too cold (Score:2)
Re:too cold (Score:5, Insightful)
2) As long as you don't get a frost buildup, solid-state electronics will generally work just fine in cold environments. Hard drives *might* have some mechanical difficulties if you take them really far below zero, and laptop batteries tend to have a tough time maintaining a charge in the cold. Apart from that, though, you could probably let it get that cold without worrying about the servers themselves. However, the admins running the servers might mutiny if you subject them those sorts of conditions
3) The servers aren't going to be outdoors. Duh.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Meh (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
You joke, but it kind of creeps me out just how "world domination'-y this Google/Microsoft data center rush is. I mean, people around here bitch about barriers to market entry in things like phone or ISP service; the information-collator business will make competition costs in those businesses look like setting up competing lemonade stands by comparison.
These guys are playing Risk for ten, perhaps twenty years from now (banking of course on the world not ending in fire by 2020; then again, what do you hav
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps. I agree that it seems, re: Moore's Law et al., that a huge infrastructure investment in *boxes and racks* is foolhardy. However, what if the investment is just a placeholder for more valuable enduring capital? If, ten years from now, the limiter is not bandwidth but power consumption (energy crisis?), would it not be a huge advantage to have installations already well-established, and worry about what goes in them as computers become ever more powerful? The jokes about "how about a beowulf cluste
Clearly (Score:2)
An honest question. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:An honest question. (Score:5, Interesting)
- it involves a lot of computers
- Microsoft comes from a shrinkwrap background not online business
- Siberia summons images of cold, wild, hostile environments
- This is a datacenter far from where most of the users live and is therefore an interesting consequence of the Internet
So I mod the article up any day and welcome our Siberian overlords.
Parent
Re:An honest question. (Score:4, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, Siberian overlords welcome you!
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
An honest answer (Score:2)
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=garry+kasparov+jail&btnG=Search+News [google.com]
A cage match featuring Ballmer and his chair of choice against Vladimir might be interesting, if brief:
Silly SlipperHat! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:An honest question. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure about people who don't live in the US, but for Americans (strangley enough) the term "Siberia" holds a special place for us. As a kid who grew up during the Regan administration everyone would talk about how bad the Soviets were and that if you spoke out against the government you were sent to Siberia regardless and how much better we were for not doing that.
Eventually it got to be a cliche joke (which is why the "In Soviet Russia...") and Americans often joke among each other about being carted off to Siberia for minor offenses.
Now these days I'm sure if you asked the average Russian about what he thought of Siberia and he would most likley think of it as a place much like North Dakato in which it was boring and he wouldn't have any idea why anyone would live there, but if you asked an American, he'd conjure up images of Russian guards in great coats drunk on vodka forcing some poor Microsoft employee to work on the servers while a big picture of Stalin looked down on them in the camp.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Both areas share a few commonalities: cheap labor, cheap electricity and rural enough to be isolated from any major events that tend bigger cities tend to be prone to. Microsoft sees this and is using it to their advantage, just like any other company would.
Re: (Score:2)
Risk (Score:3)
Risk games are endless. Sometime in a distant post-ice-age future, the war-like Mikrosoftsi will attack the southern tribes with deadly chairs.
Stable power?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Am I the only one that can think of a few other places with stable power supply? Seriously, what's the upside to a datacenter in Irkutsk?
Re: (Score:2)
Oh wait...out of the frying pan into the fire?
Re:Stable power?? (Score:5, Interesting)
The upside is you throw a lot of money at a country that's recently stepped up anti-piracy efforts (albeit biased against dissidents [slashdot.org]), thus getting a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" arrangement. Microsoft helps boost the Russian economy, possibly even throwing extra money to help offset "improvement costs" in the area, and Russia continues to make sure those nasty pirates stay away (at least the pirates engaging in double-plus ungood speech).
But then again, I am pretty cynical when it comes to money and politics.
Parent
Exile? (Score:4, Funny)
Crack? Window? (Score:2)
It's All About Cooling (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
New say to handle deadlines (Score:4, Informative)
Some kidding aside, one chief reason (among others) to have facilities on the other side of the planet is just that - overnight labor capable of delivering a PM customer change request that can be delivered the next morning AM.
But, it's just for Microsoft. (Score:3, Insightful)
I presume that by Microsoft doing this it will house only their servers (so shipping them in bulk for a 5000km trip won't really be a significant cost) and they'll be making their own arrangements for uplinks to Russia, Europe and China; probably by laying their own fiber.
Out of curiosity - how will they persuade sysadmins & rack monkeys to emmigrate to Siberia? I can't imagine the long winters and complete lack of night life would be of any interest, unless their thinking of staffing the whole thing with native Russians?
Re: (Score:2)
We're talking Microsoft employees here. They don't care.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:But, it's just for Microsoft. (Score:5, Informative)
It's not exactly in the middle of nowhere, though. The city of Irkutsk has a population of approx. 600.000, and the Irkutsk oblast (region) is 2,5 million. So the population (and therefore available workforce) is most certainly there.
Besides, Microsoft already has departments in Russia, so the employees for this data center will probably come mainly from those. Also, comp.sci education in Russian universities has a fairly good reputation, so recruiting new people shouldn't be a problem.
A more obvious site would perhaps have been Novosibirsk (1,4 million), home to Novosibirsk State University -- the science captial of the Soviet Union.
However, I suspect Irkutsk was chosen partly because it is located (more or less) in the middle of Russia -- about halfway from St. Petersburg in the west to Vladivostok in the East -- and because labor is cheaper in Siberia than in Moscow or St.Petersburg.
Granted, the night life is far from what we've come to expect in most of Europe or the US, but there are bars, clubs and even a couple of decent restaurants. I had the best sushi of my life in Irkusk a couple of years ago.
Parent
Honestly (Score:5, Funny)
Relative humidity? (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe they can use the exhaled breath of a herd of yaks to raise the humidity level. Oh, wait, no, you wouldn't actually get any LEED points for that.
Stable power? (Score:2)
Re:Save money (Score:5, Interesting)
I would not want to design the cooling/heating system for a datacenter to cope with that.
Also, where are they going to get the fiber to hook the thing up? It is not like there is plenty of abundant network infrastructure there.
Parent
Re:Save money (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's only a short step from Vancouver to Washington, but -- trust me -- the monkeys in Redmond aren't as bright.
Re:Save money (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Save money (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but I think the stuff's way too creepy to use. For example, how it know what to keep out? How? Tell me.
O KTHXB YE TEHNGU
Re: (Score:2)
I have heard that Siberia has a lot of tech. My guess is that Siberia was the USSRs New Mexico. A remote place full of high tech.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody went to Syberia by his/her own accord/desire. That place was far away (until Aeroflot introduced flights to those places), and winter is freezing
You have to be specific ... try Oymyakon (Score:2)
"The Northern part of Russia
The northern part of Russia from the Kola Peninsula to the island of Sakhalin is in the sub arctic climatic zone, which features are a long and cold winter and a short but warm summer. Within this zone, in Jakutiya, is the town of Oymyakon, where the absolute minimum of temperature (-71 C) for the northern hemisphere of the Earth has been observed. There the average temperature of January
Re: (Score:2)
Designing cooling/heating systems for Syberia are not so different than for other places - especially when the temperature change is slow (seasonal)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't seem to find it now, but one supercomputing or data center in Minnesota or some other cold place used to dump the heat from the computers into the parking garage.
Nearly everybody likes them (Score:3, Interesting)
As in nearly everyone likes and uses them?