<story><title>A Rare Tour of Microsoft’s Hyperscale Datacenters</title><url>http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/26/rare-tour-microsofts-hyperscale-datacenters/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;What came out of this was a realization that we were really building large air conditioners, that we were not in the IT business but in the industrial air conditioning business when you build a facility like this.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This was one of the big secrets that Google learned early on. Every bit of air you cool that isn&amp;#x27;t going into a computer is wasted. The issue is that co-location facilities have to be ready for any kind of user equipment, but if you own the entire data center and all the equipment inside you can design it differently and &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; more efficiently. It stops being computers in a building and starts being a building sized computer.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Rare Tour of Microsoft’s Hyperscale Datacenters</title><url>http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/26/rare-tour-microsofts-hyperscale-datacenters/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danohu</author><text>It will be interesting to see how these improvements trickle down.&lt;p&gt;At the moment, a few providers have the scale and skills to run datacenters much more efficiently. But I&amp;#x27;m guessing that within a few years there will be some generic datacenter-in-a-container available, with efficiency not much inferior to the big four.&lt;p&gt;At that point, we go back to the hosting market of 15 years ago. Everybody can offer a datacenter without deep technical knowledge, and sell compute cycles on an open cloud market.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like all the tiny hosting providers, except that it requires more capital. So it becomes financialised -- if you can get cheap power, low temperatures and good connectivity, and borrow a few million dollars cheaply, then you&amp;#x27;re in business. But margins collapse precisely because nobody can do it.&lt;p&gt;In the end, once we get over the transition period of this move to cloud everything, datacenters end up like utilities</text></comment>