Latest Microsoft publications

Microsoft announced its plan to increase its data centres by 50 to 100 per year – not just next year, but every year for the foreseeable future. The announcement came during the unveiling of the company’s new virtual tours of the ‘typical’ Microsoft data centre.

There were no specifications offered as to whether the new data centres would be new construction or retrofitting of existing facilities; nor whether Microsoft would be taking the projects on alone or would have a partner (or several) in their expansion. They did, however, state that they expect to expand cloud services into 10 new countries this year, which will require some of the data centres planned to be in new locations.

Microsoft has introduced a transportable modular data centre to bring Azure access to hard to reach locations in need of cloud computing and storage.

The tech giant said the ruggedised data centre, which comes in a radio frequency shielded unit, enables cloud access even in areas where there is unreliable network availability, or where temperature, humidity, and surface levels usually pose a deployment challenge. 

Microsoft says underwater data centres are not just feasible but even more reliable than their land-dwelling counterparts after succesfully concluding an experimental subsea data centre project.

This summer, Microsoft retrieved a container-sized data centre dropped 118-feet deep to the Scottish seafloor in spring 2018 as part of Phase II of Project Natick, a two-year research effort investigating the performance, reliability and viability of submerged servers.

A cooling failure at an Azure data centre in the UK has sparked system problems for organisations across the country, including Public Health England’s (PHE) coronavirus case dashboard.

The platform is used to track the number of new positive coronavirus cases and reported deaths linked to the virus in England and is normally updated daily.

The US Department of Defence (DoD) has reaffirmed its decision to award Microsoft with a major military cloud contract in the latest blow to Amazon’s attempts to overturn the award.

In March, the DoD said it would launch a reevaluation of its decision to address Amazon’s claims the JEDI award was based on politics instead of the merit of the respective cloud provider’s proposals.