My view on the interesting things happening at the intersection of business, technology, society, and the environment.[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]
"It's all about the infrastructure" by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations
- The cloud sounds romantic but it's 1.5 million pounds of batteries, 1 million pounds of steel, 300 miles of cable. Not so romantic. (Image courtesty of Niall Kennedy's Flickr photos)
- Opex and Capex are THE KEYS: If your revenue goes up a hockey stick....and your CapEx and OpEx curves go up with it...you haven't succeeded
- [finally!! Somebody else is talking about this!! This is super critical in SaaS. It's easy to make a company deliver apps over the web. It's hard to do it in a way that you can serve a lot of people cost effectively and make more profit as you scale.]
- Scale: can you scale up to 3.5GB/minute TOMORROW?
- Reach: Microsoft is running services in 235 countries around the world
- Servers: This is critical
- configration optimization: go for standardization / optimization
- Density: watts/square foot is important; drive density up by 200% you can drop power costs 40% (!).
- Storage costs: There has been an 85% drop in a Terabyte of data THIS YEAR.
- Technology evolution: staying on the curve helps you be operationally efficient.
- Data center critical success factors. (there are more but she wouldn't share them)
- connectivity: critical
- location, location, location (close to connectivity and supplies and resources and people)
- materials and equipment: (if you buy a million pounds of steel and steel prices go up....you have a $5M bill)
- trades and labour: we have waited months for an electrical person
- power:
- we now count in terms of megawatts not square footage. That is a key metric.
- 30-40% of your power usage is COOLING!!!! so build green!
- looking at solar - it's incredibly important to us
- Opening a data center in Quincy Washington that is completeley carbon neutral
- Additional useful links: