Spend some time with Christian Belady, Microsoft’s general manager of Datacenter Advanced Development and you will hear him say his goal in life is to make datacenters disappear. Anyone who knows him can see his dedication to shrinking the amount of infrastructure needed to run a datacenter. Recognized in the industry as one of the “Five People Who Changed the Datacenter,” Christian estimates that 50 percent of the power consumed by a typical datacenter isn’t for its servers, but the mechanical and electrical infrastructure that runs them: chillers, generators, uninterruptible power supply (UPS), batteries, and air handlers.

In this recent feature article Christian discusses what Microsoft is doing inside the datacenter and his role in working with others in the industry on the quest for better ways to measure, monitor and reduce energy use and carbon emissions to support the future of cloud computing.