Microsoft Corp.'s plan to fill its mammoth Chicago data center with servers housed in 40-foot shipping containers has experts wondering whether the strategy will succeed. In Microsoft's plan, each container in the data center, still being built, will be filled with several thousand servers.
Computerworld queried several outside experts — including the president of a data center construction firm, a data center engineer-turned-CIO, an operations executive for a data center operator and a "green" data center consultant — to get their assessments of the strategy. While they were individually impressed with some parts of Microsoft's plan, they also expressed skepticism that the idea will work in the long term.
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