Read an interesting article in today's Chicago Tribune profiling Microsoft Corp.'s $500 million, 707,000-square-foot data center in suburban Chicago.
The article touts the rather nondescript facility - at least from the outside - as a one-stop shop for the digital needs of government agencies, companies and millions of individuals. Building engineers are working on ways to make the powerful facility more energy efficient, including specifying hardware that tolerates a wide temperature range, chillers that bring in outside air when it is cold, and servers containing no individual fans.
Electronic monitoring also allows individual customers to track and report carbon emissions related to their computing.
The article talks about how the so-called cloud computing could significantly cut information technology costs, making corporate IT departments obsolete. Concerns about security and reliability remain, but this is an interesting take on the possible future of data centers.