In the years to come, Microsoft's data centers may not be gigantic buildings strongly packed with server racks, but quite rows of small, stand-alone IT units extend across acres and acres of cool, cheap land.
At the Datacenter Dynamics conference in New York on Wednesday, general managers Kevin Timmons delineate a few prototype works his unit is doing to design its next generation of data centers, in alliance with Microsoft Research.
The company is field-testing rather Timmons calls IT PACs, or IT preassembled components, which are small, independent units that are assembled off-site and can be connected together to build out an whole data center.
He said, is facing the similar challenges as most data center operators. It wants the capability to ramp up capacity in short order, but want to avoid the huge up-front costs and long lead times necessary to build out traditional data centers. Given this set of conditions, Microsoft's target for building its next set of data centers is "ultra-modularity," Timmons said.
In place of paying US$400 million or more up front to build a data center, Microsoft would choose to buy some land, build a sub-station and after that populate the land with modular units of servers as demand grows.
"We would like to view our data centers as more of a traditional manufacturing supply chain, rather than monolithic builds," he said. "It will not all be built on-site in one shot."
By going with this way, Microsoft can cut the time it takes to ramp up new server capacity in half, and cut the costs of building out new data centers, Timmons guessed. "You don’t have have to commit to a $400 million data center and expect that demand shows up," he said.
The IT PACs are "not really containers in a traditional sense," Timmons said. "They are really incorporated air-handling and IT units."
The units themselves could hold anywhere from one to 10,000 servers. The idea is that when the software giant requires more resources, it can have one of these IT PACs shipped to location and "plugged into the spine," which supplies the power and network connectivity to the data center.
Microsoft has built two proof-of-concept models so far. Its next data center, which the company will announce in a few months, will use some form of these IT PACs, Timmons said.
The units will be assembled entirely from commercially available components. A single person should be able to build a unit within four working days. The servers will be stacked in rows, sandwiched between air intake and output vents.

The construction materials rely heavily on steel and aluminum, both easily recyclable. The water requirements can be met by a single hose with residential levels of water pressure, he said.

The development team considered various sizes of containers, Timmons said, keeping an eye toward making the units simply shippable. They settled on a size that could contain 1,200 to 2,100 servers and draw between 400 and 600 KW.
The units can be located inside a huge building, or when ready with outer protective panels, reside out in the open.

One of the chief requirements of IT PACs, he declared, is that they reside in an area where the ambient temperature is mild sufficient that it can give sufficient cooling. Because of their highly portable nature, this should not be a problem, he said.

If the IT PACs are ultimately pushed into production, Timmons said he has not fully decided if Microsoft will build them itself or contract them out. It would possibly be a mix of the two, he guessed. “I know how much it costs to build one of these now," he said.