Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / "It's all about the infrastructure" by Debra Chrapaty, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Operations Group

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[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: