Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia

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.

An honest question.

[SlipperHat]

Not to troll, but why is this news? What is newsworthy about a company expanding into another country? You could say "Oh it's Siberia!", but Siberia is a place like any other.

Stable power??

[pixelated77]

From TFA : "The region was attractive to Microsoft due to its stable power supply..."

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:too cold

[moosesocks]

1) Siberia gets a lot colder than -10C. -10C is 14F. That's not cold at all -- a -10C winter day in Virginia wouldn't be considered all that odd.

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.

But, it's just for Microsoft.

[drspliff]

Nobody would in their right mind build a shared-use data center in the middle of nowhere because neither the population or the tranist are there.

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:An honest question.

[vertinox]

Not to troll, but why is this news? What is newsworthy about a company expanding into another country? You could say "Oh it's Siberia!", but Siberia is a place like any other.

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.

Re:Save money

[CastrTroy]

Seems to me that operating in those conditions would be better than operating in California. Where it's 30 degrees in the summer, and 15 degrees in the winter. They would need cooling pretty much year round. Whereas in Edmonton or Siberia, they would only need cooling for half of the year.

Data security?

[goombah99]

While your comment was intended as a joke, off shoring data centers in other countires (i.e. US data in the FSU or chinese data in the US) has some interesting possibilities besides exiling employees. Do they have to abide by US laws for that data? Do they have to hand it over to the Siberian state police on demand or reveal the accounts of dissidents putin is trying to crush? Can they encrypt data or will that run afoul of ITAR laws in both host and owner companies?

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?

Re:Datacenter as home heating?

[hackstraw]

I was really expecting to see some sort of design whereby the waste heat from the datacenter was used to heat homes or apartment buildings.

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.

Re:too cold

[jeorgen]

and laptop batteries tend to have a tough time maintaining a charge in the cold.

They maintain charge very well in cold, but the chemical activity is very low due to the low temperature.