I don't normally focus on a single company's PR efforts on this blog, as the focus is on law and regulatory affairs that affect green technology. Occasionally, though, something pretty impressive comes along and it's worth blogging about. Microsoft's new Chicago data center is in that category.

Online this past summer, the company recently threw its doors open for media and tech executives, which is a pretty unusual move in and of itself. My guess is that in addition to the positive press about the green features of the data center, Microsoft is trying to get the word about its future cloud based computing strategy, an evolution of the Live service Microsoft calls "Software plus Services." The Chicago facility is one of two recently opened by Microsoft (the other is in Dublin).

The 700,000 square foot Chicago facility houses a traditional data center, with raised floors for cooling and fiber optic and electrical conduit running overhead. Over two third of the facility, however, is made of concrete parking spaces, each large enough to hold a 40-foot standard container. Yeah, you know, the containers that bring over goods from Asia and sit on semi trucks. Microsoft is deploying, on a large scale, container data centers, with each container delivered from the manufacturer with approximately 2,000 servers inside. The company uses a standard interface it calls "CBlox" to plug in each container into the power and network grid. Each container weighs 60 tons, but by using "air skates" only four employees are needed to move containers into their parking spaces. Within one 8-hour workday, a container can be fully installed, including network, power and chilled water connections.

The data center is designed to be environmentally friendly from the beginning:

The raised-floor area is fed by a cooling loop filled with 47-degree chilled water, while the container area is supported by a separate chilled water loop running at 65 degrees. Of the facility's total 30-megawatt power capacity, about 20 megawatts is dedicated to the container area, with about 10 megawatts for the raised floor pods. The power infrastructure also includes 11 power rooms and 11 diesel generators, each providing 2.8 megawatts of potential backup power that can be called upon in the event of a utility outage.

So is Microsoft on to something here? The data center's total investment is expected to pass $500 million, so clearly the company thinks containerized data centers are a critical trend. Data centers have always been fairly independent and isolated entities, but containerization takes that to a whole new level. Imagine moving data centers on semi trucks to best take advantage of weather or lower tax or real estate rental rates. The future of data centers, it seems, will ride on air skates and semi trucks.