Interesting Facts About Microsoft’s Datacenters and Cloud Infrastructure

By Zubair Alexander

- On May 9, 2015

Did you know that Microsoft has been building datacenters for over 25 years? There are some interesting facts about Microsoft datacenters that I thought you would enjoy reading. Check them out and then take a tour of these datacenters.

First datacenter was built in 1989.
100+ datacenters.
1 million servers providing support for the cloud services that are offered 24x7x365.
1 billion customers in 90 marketplaces around the world.
200 cloud services, including Bing, MSN, Outlook.com, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform.
15 billion dollars in investment in the cloud services.
30 trillion objects stored at the datacenters.
2.3 billion kWh of green power purchased by Microsoft to support their carbon-neutral goal, which is ranked as the third most by any American company by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
100% of the servers and electronic equipment is sent to a third-party vendor for recycling or reselling after it has been securely decommissioned.
Microsoft's fiber optic network can stretch to the moon and back 3 times.
The datacenters process 1.5 million requests per second.
Some of the locations for datacenters include Amsterdam; Australia; Boydton, VA; Brazil; Cheyenne, WY; China; Chicago, IL; Des Moines, IA; Dublin, Ireland; Hong Kong; Japan; Quincy, WA; and San Antonio, TX.
The datacenter in Quincy, Washington is the size of 10 football fields.

Microsoft Datacenter Tour Check out this really nice video for a tour of Microsoft's datacenters. The video is fascinating and, among other things, shows you how the datacenters are built. Microsoft has mastered the art of building these datacenters quickly and efficiently by using a modular design that is explained in the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uRR72b_qvc Wait.....there is more. For additional information visit Microsoft's Web site, where you will also find more videos on Microsoft's cloud security, reliability, best practices, and other topics.