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.

Re:Save money

[arivanov]

When people think of Siberia, they think only of the winter. Well, it actually has a summer as well with up to +30C. It is the so called extreme continental climate which only Russia has - down to -40C winter, +36 in the middle of summer.

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.

Re:Stable power??

[faloi]

Seriously, what's the upside to a datacenter in Irkutsk?

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.

Re:An honest question.

[glop]

Well, I found the news interesting. I wouldn't want a report for every data center but I find that this kind of information is newsworthy because:
  - 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.

Re:But, it's just for Microsoft.

[jbburks]

Let's see - where do I start:

Irkutsk is on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the main East-West transport axis. You can bet there's a lot of fiber down the railroad right-of-way, so comms won't be a problem.

Irkutsk is on the Angara River, which is fed by Lake Baikal. The Bratsk dam (4,500MW) is one of the largest hydropower dams in the world, and there are three more on the Angara. Can you say "zero carbon emissions" and "reliability"?

I would staff the facility with all but a handful of positions being Russian. You can get CCNA/MCSE level people there for less than $10,000USD/year. And, they are quite competent (think Tetris or some of the Russian hackers).

As another poster points out, it doesn't matter any more where there server is located, with the competent remote support tools that all current OSs have.

I would say it's one of the better decisions Microsoft has made.

Datacenter as home heating?

[ThreeGigs]

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. Charging a price that's half of what it would normally cost to heat a building, and supplying the waste heat from the data center would lead to significantly reduced operating costs for the datacenter, and lower cost heating for neighboring structures. Sounds like a win/win situation if done right.

Nearly everybody likes them

[AHumbleOpinion]

The word 'kut' means vagina in dutch. Somehow this seems very appropriate for MS...

As in nearly everyone likes and uses them? :-)

50 megawatt

[m2shariy]

50 megawatt divided by 10,000 servers gives 5 kilowatts per server.
Isn't that too much?