Microsoft spends $130 million to expand green data center

According to foreign media reports, Microsoft plans to invest 130 million US dollars to expand its data center in Dublin, which will further enhance the green energy conservation level, and is expected to be within the next 12 months. Employ 50 to 70 employees and provide 400 jobs.

Previously, Microsoft had invested $500 million to build the Dublin data center. The data center provides computing capabilities for users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This investment will add 112,000 square feet of 4th generation equipment. The data center makes full use of wind energy cooling equipment throughout the year to reduce energy consumption and reduce Microsoft's carbon footprint. The average power usage efficiency PUE is 1.25 during the peak energy consumption period each year.

PUE, energy efficiency, is the ratio of total energy consumption of data centers to energy consumption of IT equipment. It is an internationally common indicator for evaluating the energy efficiency of data centers. The benchmark is 2, and the closer to 1, the higher the energy efficiency of the data center.

IT equipment in the data center generally refers to various servers and storage. Switches, etc., while other devices have refrigeration equipment, lighting, and so on. We can see from the standard data center energy allocation of the above figure that cooling accounts for the largest proportion of IT equipment.

Microsoft said that 99% of the remaining energy consumption of devices in the data center will be recycled, and the water consumption is only 1% of the energy consumption of the same size data center. Peter Klein, chief financial officer of Microsoft's business unit, said, "This investment will be 50% higher than traditional data center energy utilization, showing that Microsoft looks to the future. As users reach cloud services such as Office365, Windows Live, Xbox Live and Bing, Microsoft will invest in regional cloud infrastructure to meet user needs. ”