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“Microsoft is in the process of building the industry's first container-based datacenter.”

The whole datacenter topic is one I expect to find myself talking about more and more over the next year. A whole new game is emerging that some call Cloud Computing. One way of building these datacenters is through the use of containers and Michael Manos from our Data Center Services group talked about this yesterday at the AFCOM Data Center World conference. (Wow, there is a world conference for datacenters).

Christian Belady in the same group as Michael has a rather interesting job title - Principal Power and Cooling Architect.

You may chuckle but this stuff is important. Both the datacenters and and the power and cooling stuff. Datacenters that are so large you can see them from the moon will require a lot of power….and a lot of cooling. In an increasingly eco friendly world, this needs to be done in an environmentally friendly way.

I can’t say a great deal about our datacenter group but I will say this – they’re incredibly thorough about their work. In a way I wish some other groups were to be honest. When you build something that costs many many millions you need to be damn sure you chose the right place and approach. These guys impress me a lot and I’m not alone

bonus link - Microsoft's James Hamilton has made some interesting presentations on this and related topics and blogged about this far more eloquently than I just did :)