Mike Manos, Dan Costello, and Christian Belady have a new post uping the ante on sharing Data Center Design.

What is Generation 4?

Generation 4 design has been under heavy engineering for viability and cost for over a year. While the demand of our commercial growth required us to make investments as we grew, we treated each step in the learning as a process for further innovation in data centers. The design for our future Gen 4 facilities enabled us to make visionary advances that addressed the challenges of building, running, and operating facilities all in one concerted effort.

To summarize, the key characteristics of our Generation 4 data centers are:

Scalable

Plug-and-play spine infrastructure

Factory pre-assembled: Pre-Assembled Containers (PACs) & Pre-Manufactured Buildings (PMBs)

Rapid deployment

De-mountable

Reduce TTM

Reduced construction

Sustainable measures

Map applications to DC Class

The article is quite long with lots of details.

Bottom line: Microsoft is building a modular data center where all parts of the data center are containerized/modularized into building blocks.

Think of it like “building blocks”, where the data center will be composed of modular units of prefabricated mechanical, electrical, security components, etc., in addition to containerized servers.

Their vision

“A highly modular, scalable, efficient, just-in-time data center capacity program that can be delivered anywhere in the world very quickly and cheaply, while allowing for continued growth as required.”