Microsoft’s Data Centre Of The Future

Microsoft is a changing company. Of course, this is already clear with the shift to cloud and mobile that Nadella has ushered in over the past year or so, but in the background, the culture itself is changing and there’s a lot going on that isn’t visible to the consumer.

“Satya is a fantastic leader. He is part of the big culture change at Microsoft,” said Kushagra Vaid, a server and engineering manager in Microsoft’s cloud division. Speaking to Vaid, and indeed, hearing him present a keynote at the Data Centre Dynamics Converged event at CeBIT 2015, was much akin to listening to young startup entrepreneur revving up their ideas in front of a buzzing audience. Vaid was enthused, happy, and excited, but it wasn’t new phones he was flogging, or a very media-savvy Windows 10, but it was the humble data centre that provides the background to Microsoft’s cloud that Vaid was talking about.

Devices, apps, and data

With the phenomenal rate of growth in cloud computing, the increasing number of cloud applications are demanding mega-scale infrastructures, and these infrastructures all have the same backbone, the data centre.

For companies the size of Microsoft, running data centres efficiently and at their lowest cost, and of course providing tip top scalability to millions of customers, obviously comes as a high priority, and Microsoft’s Kushagra Vaid told TechWeekEurope that the key to this is in the software-defined data centre.

“Our industry is going through major transition. We are all aware of the explosion of devices, with an average of three devices per person,” said Vaid.

“As a result of that, devices have taken on a life of their own. Devices have led to the application ecosystem. This is an economy of its own. We then get into the big data and Internet of Things space.”

Zbs and Zbs

The explosion of devices and data stored from them in the cloud is truly unimaginable. Research firm IDC recently predicted that by the end of this decade, the total amount of data on earth will be around 40 zettabytes. Just to put that into perspective, one zettabyte is a ‘1’ followed by twenty-one ‘0’s. (It looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.) To further quantify this figure, IDC said: “There are 700,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on all the beaches on earth (or seven quintillion five quadrillion). That means 40 ZB is equal to 57 times the amount of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.”

And Microsoft, although traditionally an operating system provider, plays no small part in adding to this heap of data. Vaid explained on stage how his firm’s Bing search platform gets 7 billion global search queries each month. Over 30 trillion objects are stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Microsoft has 400 million active users on Outlook, and each month, 50 billion minutes are spent on Skype calls across the world.

Bing’s usage or Outlook’s users may pale in comparison to competitors such as Google (Google can reportedly get over 3 billion a day), but when you put all of these services together (200, as Vaid pointed out) you have a company which is truly playing a part in the future of storing humanity’s past.

All thanks to the data centre

Now this is where the data centres come in. “What does it take to operate all of this? The first thing you have to do is make sure you have a global strategy for delivering capacity,” Vaid illustrated.

“To the end customer, the perception is that there is infinite capacity at the push of a button. But in reality, you’re trying to match demand to capacity. If demand exceeds capacity, your customers are not going to be happy.”

Churning all of this data produced by civilisation is the data centre, it is therefore obvious to point out that particular importance should be paid to data centre operations and cost saving for any company using them for the cloud.

This is where Microsoft’s software-defined future comes into play. To effectively utilise cloud, Vaid said that its backbone has to be resilient, with software able to solve problems with hardware, and self-healing solutions available which route around failures.

Scaling effectively to the cloud, Vaid said, does not include “brittle networks, people responding to alerts, and reactions to the customer rather than the business enabling the customer.”

This, according to Microsoft, is what the software-defined data centre can bring. “Our vision is all software-defined. How do we simplify the cloud infrastructure so that we don’t have to worry too much about failures in the hardware.” The key to this software-defined vision is open source, both hardware and software,” said Vaid.

“All of the hardware in our data centres is open source,” Vaid said. “We have not held anything back. The idea is that by making everything publicly available we will stimulate an ecosystem where people can bring new ideas into the community and keep enhancing it.”

But the problem for Microsoft is that, naturally, there is competition. Microsoft’s main arch enemies are typically cloud providers Amazon with AWS and Google with the Google Cloud Platform. But Vaid told TechWeekEurope he isn’t so worried about them.

“Microsoft is the only company that has a huge presence in public cloud but at the same time has a huge presence in the enterprise and public cloud. Our strategy with the open sourcing is that we have a consistent platform between these two worlds giving all the benefits of our public cloud to our enterprise customers. Also, when it comes to differentiating on operations – that is really in the services we offer. Azure, Office, Bing, that’s where the differentiation is.”

The future?

I asked Vaid what data centres will look like in the future. Will there be a data centre of some sort on every street corner, just like fibre boxes? Or will the future for data centres hold be in huge facilities just like Apple’s planned 120,000 square metre build?

“It will be big,” said Vaid. “There is a level of efficiency you can get with these massive upscale data centres that you cannot really get if you go small. At the same time, you want to have these small centres closer to the customer for latency reasons. So I don’t think we can say it will be this or that, I think it will be a combination of both.”