Why Google and Microsoft are building $500M data centers

San Francisco experienced a power outage yesterday that caused the 365 Main data center to go down. DataCenter Knowledge has all the details about why the backup generators failed. Techmeme is flooded with blog posts about the failure that affected sites like CraigsList, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, Second Life and Yelp. Millions of users were not able to use these services.

Business users demand 24 X 7 X 365 uptime. This is why Google and Microsoft are building massive data centers costing $500 million each all over the country. There are only a few companies in the world that have the financial resources to build multiple data centers, and that have the technical skills to keep them running efficiently.

Free services and social networks can get by with some power outages and a few data losses. Users will complain...but life goes on. Not so with business users. There are huge impacts, both financial and legal, when service is interrupted or data is lost.

Software is increasingly moving towards hosted services. Microsoft is working hard to deliver "Software + Services" to give users the best of both worlds. Keeping data synchronized on clients and servers, and delivering a great user experience while on-line and off, is a big challenge.

The San Francisco data center crash may make people stop and think about who they want to trust with their data and services. That is why Microsoft and Google are spending billions on data centers.

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Comments

[Kevin Tunis]

So where does this put Microsoft Partners that have invested in their own data center and hosted SaaS services?

[valleyblogzine]

In my opinion there is a lot more awareness of replication amongst the business application community. Salesforce.com has multiple data centers since they have strict SLA's to satisfy and any data loss could result in them going out of business. The companies that were affected were mostly free services so the impact was bad but not critical. As they mature where any down times would prove disastrous, they'd have enough saefguards in place since this is just a question of adopting a policy since most of the pieces needed to get business continuity have already existed for a while.

[Sandeep Sharma]

I probably could not get the complete message of this article.

People understand pitfalls of free services and so does business. If users see value of services provided by any company then they would stick to them. After some time data center investment of this size would become norm for online business and it would not provide any strategic advantage. Giants like Microsoft and Google can not make people move from Craiglist of Wiki just because of data centres.

[Don Dodge]

Kevin, I don't think Microsoft intends to compete with partners in the hosting business or in SaaS applications. Microsoft is building the data centers to host its own business, and as a platform for Windows Live, Office Live, and future hosted services.

ValleyBlog and Sandeep, I agree that free services can get by with less than perfect hosting services. Businesses require much more sophisticated and expensive data centers. It is the people/businesses in the middle or on the edges of the divide that will get hurt because they aren't clear about what they need.

Thanks for the comments. I appreciate you taking the time, and I always learn something when I think about how to respond.

Thanks!