Microsoft named its new CEO today, swapping out Steve Ballmer with Satya Nadella. The company is expected to continue to have the current enterprise focus except now with a twist – cloud and modern operating and infrastructure focus.

The new chief executive is known for his experience in enterprise environments, having has spearheaded major strategy and technical shifts across Microsoft’s portfolio of products and services, most notably the company’s move to the cloud and the development of one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world supporting Bing, Xbox, Office and other services.  Last week the world got a taste of where Microsoft is heading – Open Compute Project.

Microsoft made a radical change in their operating model – they gave away and donated their intellectual property to the open (source) hardware community.   John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, thinks this move is telegraphing the new direction for Microsoft.  According to Furrier “Microsoft has to evolve fast to the new market realities of software development specifically being in touch with the application diversity that exists with open source.  DevOps will be a big opportunity so enabling Open Compute Project drives more devops value where software and operations professionals can unite in this new dynamic cloud, mobile, and big data world”.

Bill Laing, CVP of Windows Server and System Center Group Development with Microsoft, took the stage at the fifth edition of Open Compute Summit in San Jose, California, to talk in depth about the “Microsoft Datacenters at Cloud Scale.”

“I’m sure some of you are wondering, ‘what is Microsoft doing here?’,” joked Laing in the beginning of his presentation, “don’t they realize OCP stands for ‘open’ computing?”

“Microsoft is pleased and proud to be here today,” Laing assured. “We’ve been inspired by the work of OCP and Facebook, and what they’ve done in pushing forward innovation in the data center. I am very excited to talk about the work that we are doing and what we plan to contribute to the project.”

Laing is responsible for the development of the software for the Windows Server, System Center, and he has been working on data center software for many years. “It’s been very exciting to see the transformations happening in the cloud data centers,” he said.

Background

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“We’ve had experience in transforming the enterprise data center over the last 15 to 20 years as we moved to industry standard servers. You probably know less about our experience in offering a broad range of cloud services,” assumed Laing. “Microsoft operates more than 200+ cloud services globally.”

“We serve more than a billion customers, more than 20 million businesses and 90 markets worldwide. We’re delivering the broadest range of different services and workloads in the industry, from search to Skype, Xbox Live, Office 365 and Windows Azure. To do this, we built a global infrastructure and we have experience of operating that, provisioning it, and growing it over a number of years,” explained Laing to the audience.

Challenges

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“It’s a big challenge to operate globally at this kind of scale: creating data centers, filling them with servers and interconnecting them,” emphasized Laing. “An insight of what we’re actually doing here: we operate a large number of global data centers, with tens of thousand of servers in them, at a large scale. We also operate smaller data centers, closer to customers. We’ve been doing this for many years. We started managing our data centers about 20 years ago, and we started offering our first internet service in 1995, and over this period we’ve invested more than $15 billion dollars in building our data centers infrastructure. Currently we have over a million servers in our data centers.”

Talking about the company’s participation in the Open Compute Project, and Microsoft’s contribution, Laing explained: “Microsoft is joining OCP. For over five years we’ve been working with hardware partners, taking them through our data centers. We’ve also brought customers into our data centers, showing them how we operate them.”

“I am happy to announce that, through OCP, we’re contributing what we’re calling ‘the Microsoft cloud server specification,'” Laing said. “This is a complete set of design specifications, for the most advanced hardware servers we’re deploying in our data centers today. We’re doing this because we want to drive innovation in cloud computing and in data centers design and operation. We not only build software to run in our data centers and to provide those services, but we also license software to our customers and partners so that they can build their own data centers and operate their own clouds. We want to drive innovation and enable them to do this. This fits very well with the overall vision and strategy of the Open Compute Project. We plan to participate in meaningful ways and we want to learn from the community.”

Bill Laing went on to present the audience Microsoft’s initial contribution.

“The chassis design, 12 UH, fits in a standard EIA rack. Given the heterogeneity of the data centers, one of the requirements we’ve had was to use industry’s standard racks. We have a compute blade and a storage blade, a shared back plain with integrated cabling, so there’s no direct cables to the blades, a shared power and cooling and a management node to manage the chassis.”

According to Laing, the three themes that have influenced their design are:

1) Modularity – at the compute and storage server, at the trey, the chassis and at the rack level
2) Simplicity
3) Efficiency

The cloud computing model is such that software balances the workload and creates high availability by placing services across different nodes, racks and even data centers. Many of the traditional features in enterprise servers, focused on high availability and reliability, are taken care of with software and are no longer needed. Simplicity and efficiency are more important. These designs can be preassembled and have minimal on-site integration, reducing human error.

The shared management console shares the management across the chassis and the rack. It’s designed to be secure, it uses a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) for security and row-based authentication to control access to the rack.

Microsoft’s open source contribution

Microsoft is actually contributing to four areas of Facebook’s Open Compute Project:

1) CAD Models
2) Specifications
3) Gerber files
4) Source code

Compared to the traditional servers, Bill Laing summarizing the benefits of Microsoft’s server: it costs 40 percent less, it is 15 percent more efficient and it can be deployed twice as fast with improved service times.

“This is important for the industry, our partners and customers. We have a vision of delivering one consistent platform where customers, service providers and the Microsoft public cloud offers a consistent environment for development, management, identity and storage. With this approach we believe we can also take the hardware capabilities, drive this innovation in standardization, so customers and service providers can also build on those clouds. We believe this design fosters innovation through OCP,” concluded Laing.