The software giant, Microsoft, is spending approximately US$ 130 million to build its second data center in Dublin, Ireland. According to Microsoft, the expansion of their data center fleet in Dublin is a response to the increased demand for cloud services such as office 365, Windows Live, Xbox Live, Bing, and Windows Azure in Europe.
The new Dublin facility, which will neighbor Microsoft’s pre-existing facility, will be a third of the size of the older Dublin facility. Construction on the new facility has commenced, but Microsoft did not state when the new facility will enter service. The new facility will be approximately 10,400 square-meters and possess up to 13 Mega Watts of total available power, as opposed to its older counterpart, which is 28,100 square-meters and has 16 Mega Watts of total available power.
The new Dublin facility will be able to accommodate servers with a power density of up to 1.3kw per square-meter. The increased power density of the data center will enable Microsoft to increase the number of servers per rack. The new facility will also possess its own power infrastructure and can be self-sufficient for intermittent periods during emergency situations.
According to Microsoft, the new data center will employ air-side economizers to reduce operational and cooling costs, which will result in a greater power efficiency rating. The older Dublin facility has a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.25, which lands close to the 1.03 PUE marks of other state-of-the-art facilities such as Facebook’s data center in Prineville, Oregon. The older Dublin data center does have a better PUE rating than Microsoft’s 2009 average PUE rating of 1.6. Microsoft has yet to reveal the new facility’s projected Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating.
Microsoft's pre-existing Dublin Data Center Entrance
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