The criteria that companies use to pick a site keep evolving, says Mike Manos, Microsoft's director of data centres. His team feeds 35 sets of data into an electronic “heat” map of the world. With colours that range from green to red, it shows where conditions are favourable and which places should be avoided. And Microsoft needs a lot of choice: if a new service suddenly becomes popular, it needs to be able to increase computing capacity quickly. That is also why it uses shipping containers pre-loaded with up to 2,000 servers, which can be up and running within hours. In the firm's Chicago data centre, over 200 such containers will populate an entire floor. Leggi ancora...

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