A recent video from Microsoft highlighted how the software giant’s datacenter strategies have changed in the era of cloud computing and provides a look inside some of its 10-football field-sized behemoths to its modular datacenter approach that is being used to power a large number of web services.
In an attempt to answer the question of “where is Microsoft’s cloud” the video takes the viewer through a short history of the company’s datacenters and provides a sense of the backup and redundancy features as well as the obligatory extended explanations of power efficiency.
While the beginning of the video is mostly a sales presentation to reassure non-technical cloud customers that Microsoft has massive layers of redundancy in place, the second half is well worth the wait as it offers some great views of the inside of a few of its cloud datacenters.
The second part of the video provides some in-depth descriptions about power and cooling, the use of modular datacenters to reduce time to deployment and costs, and how they work to reduce latency.
Videos like these go a long way toward putting the cloud in perspective. In other words, for many enterprise execs hearing all about how cloud computing can save their business and bottom line, this is a tangible sense clouds from the hardware perspective.
One could argue that other IaaS companies would be well-served by putting their clouds in context for the curious—and for the suspicious who know that “cloud” is floating around somewhere but never quite materializes as something useful.