Analysis

posted on 04 March 2008 13:47

Microsoft is aiming to build out its data centre infrastructure to rival those of Google and Amazon.

It aims to use this massive computing and storage capacity to offer cloud computing services and ensure its profitable survival as its world transitions from a desktop/server-centric software license business model to a pay-per-use utility computing model.

In an FT interview Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is quoted thus: “Amazon has one. Rumours are Google will have one. We’ve said we’re going to have one."

The company said in November last year that it was going to build a 10,000 server data centre near Irkutsk, Siberia. Google is building a massive data centre at The Dalles in Oregon, USA.

Reports are now indicating up to 24 data centres each covering half a million square feet. If true it could cost billions of dollars as the company races to catch up with Google.

The proposed Yahoo acquisition could be seen in this context.

This is a confirmation of Sun CTO Greg Papadopulos' red shift computing theory in which a handfiul of gigantically-resourced data centre companies will quickly distance themselves from enterprises today. Their literally global data centre infrastructures will enable them to offer computing resources for a fraction of the cost of existing large enterprise data centres.

Google builds its own HW and SW infrastructure using commodity server and disk drive components, Linux and its own file system and other system software.

It is not known if Microsoft will use its own system software products in its global data centre infrastructure or pursue an alternative. Recent Hotmail and Windows Live outages suggest that it may have problems to overcome. Amazon recently suffered an outage on its S3 service.

Microsoft has very recently expanded its cloud computing offer.