Microsoft Mulling Portable Data Centers?

The portable "data center in a box" concept has generated lots of publicity, but a small number of users. Sun won't begin selling its Project Blackbox container-based data centers until July. Rackable has one customer for the Concerto trailer-based data center it announced last week.

But the portable data center trend could get a huge boost from Microsoft, where an architect of the Windows Live Core team is advocating unmanned container-based commodity data centers as the future of data center infrastructure. Microsoft's James Hamilton has made two presentations recently discussing modular data centers' ability to provide economies of scale for Software as a Service (SaaS). The presentations by Hamilton, who was General Manager of the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services team before joining the Live Core effort, are available in PowerPoint and Word.

Hamilton's presentations were first noted last week by veteran Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley (link via Greg Linden), who wrote that the proposal "highlights at a high level Microsoft's heavy datacenter investments that will provide the backbone for the Microsoft Cloud OS and various Live services."

Hamilton describes a distributed network of portable data centers as "an idea whose time has come" and wrotes that "this architecture transforms data centers from static and costly behemoths into inexpensive and portable lightweights. ... Multiple smaller data centers, regionally located, could prove to be a competitive advantage."

Is this just a provocative early-stage trial balloon being debated within the Live Core OS team? Or is Microsoft genuinely ready to stake the success of its Live initiative on a paradigm shift in data center infrastructure? It's too soon to say, as few details have emerged about the Live Core OS process and strategy. Hamilton notes that many challenges must be solved to realize the potential of portable data centers. But his presentations make for intriguing reading.

First, Hamilton offers big-picture background on the options for data center infrastructure:

That's not necessarily a trivial matter, as data center operators have noted in discussions about Sun's Blackbox. But incorporating liquid cooling into high-density racks can address cooling challenges, and Hamilton argues that removing support personnel from the data centers will improve reliability, noting that "human administrative error causes 20% to 50% of system outages." Modules can be equipped with enough redundancy that "as parts fail, surviving nodes continue to support the load. ... In this modified model, the constituent components are never serviced and the entire module just slowly degrades over time as more and more systems suffer non-recoverable hardware errors. Even with 50 unrecoverable hardware failures, a 1,000 system module is still operating with 95% of its original design capacity."

Using containers would make it easier to save money by relocating infrastructure to chase cheaper bandwidth and power, Hamilton notes.

If Microsoft were to pursue a modular data center initiative, it would likely be good news for one of the hardware providers rolling out portable products. Microsoft is already a significant customer for Rackable. Hamilton's proposal discusses a 20-foot container, while Rackable's Concerto is housed in a 40-foot long trailer. But Hamilton notes that "their design scales down well so they are able to supply populated 20 foot units as well."

LiveSide, a leading news site that tracks Microsoft's Live initiatives, is taking the proposal seriously.