AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

RoughType

Bill Gates, in his farewell address at Microsoft’s TechEd developer conference today, sketched out Microsoft’s expansive plan for cloud computing. The company, he said, will have “many millions” of servers in a network of data centers. Those centers will ultimately provide as utility services everything done today by traditional Microsoft software installed on local servers:

We’re taking everything we do at the server level, and saying that we will have a service that mirrors that exactly. The simplest one of those is to say, okay, I can run Exchange on premise, or I can connect up to it as a service. But even at the BizTalk level, we’ll have BizTalk Services. For SQL, we’ll have SQL Server Data Services, and so you can connect up, build the database. It will be hosted in our cloud with the big, big data center, and geo-distributed automatically. This is kind of fascinating because it’s getting us to think about data centers at a scale that never existed before. Literally today we have, in our data center, many hundreds of thousands of servers, and in the future we’ll have many millions of those servers.

The design of massive data centers, said Gates, is one of the key areas of innovation in computing today, and the huge investments required will limit the construction of cloud-computing centers to just a handful of companies:

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