Found a posting about Yahoo's new data center. A bunch of us are wondering why Yahoo would paint their building purple? I've been to the Microsoft Data Center in Quincy a couple of times, and it is a lot bigger. I can't quote you the size, but if you walk around the building you'll have traveled 1.3 miles. That's a lot bigger than 14,000 140,000 square ft (Below is a typo, the building is 140,000 sq ft) , and the Microsoft guys painted the roof white to help reflect the sun during the hot summers. I wonder how much hotter the building gets when they are purple? I've got to believe it was the PR/corporate image team who decided to paint the building purple.
Yahoo! builds new Data Center the green way
A new 14,000 sq. ft Yahoo! data center was open in Quincy, Washington and had a welcome ribbon cutting by David Filo as well as Wylie Gustafson, the original guy who yodels “Yahoo!” at the end of commercials. Quincy, Washington was chosen as the prime location due to its fiber connectivity, network availability, affordable power, land and operations, and welcoming community. The best part about this data center was that it was custom built as opposed to all the other data centers that are usually rented. This allowed Yahoo! to put energy efficiency as a top priority in the design and construction of the data center. One advantange of being in Washington was the ability to draw in the cold air outside to cool the servers without using air conditioning. Carbon-free electricity using hydro and wind power the facility and all the lights operate on motion sensors. This is a great step in Yahoo!’s step in reducing energy consumption and becoming carbon neutral by the end of this year.
Here are more details about the Microsoft Data Center for comparison.
Microsoft has completed its first building at its Quincy, Washington data center and a leisurely walk around it is about 1.3 miles.
That little ditty comes from Michael Manos, senior director of Microsoft’s data center services unit. Manos was interviewed by Tina Wood at Channel 10.
Some other key highlights from Manos:
- The general idea for Microsoft’s data centers is to make them a development platform (presumably for cloud services in the future).
- Microsoft takes being green and sustainability seriously to be socially conscious and save money. Manos didn’t serve up many specifics.
- The software giant goes through a 31-factor heat map to select locations for data centers. These factors include the price of land, power capacity and fiber-optic availability. These maps are also used to find good locations to position Microsoft for the future.
- Microsoft has started a data center in San Antonio.