Some 51,000sq metres in Grange Castle Business Park in Dublin will soon be home to Microsoft’s new European data centre that will serve the entire EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region.
This means that tens of thousands of servers located in Ireland will provide Windows users with information and services like Windows Live as well as store actual data for Microsoft’s online services businesses including MSN.
During the construction phase alone Microsoft will be investing US$500m in the data centre’s infrastructure, after which state-of-the-art server technology will be installed. This is expected to be completed by summer 2009.
What is unique about this new development is that it is Microsoft’s first ‘mega data centre’ outside of the US that is directed at expanding Windows Live services.
Joe Macri, managing director at Microsoft Ireland, said that in choosing Ireland as a location for the new centre is a “very strong endorsement of the success of our operations here over the past 22 years”.
Macri said: “We are excited about our expansion in Ireland and about the fact that Ireland will now play a significant role in the delivery of online services to customers across EMEA and beyond.
“The move to software and services is changing the way software is delivered and used and our global data centre strategy is central to facilitating that change.”
The centre, which begins construction later this moth, will incorporate energy-efficient design as well as sustainability and is expected to be 50pc more efficient than other facilities of the same scale leading to millions of kilowatt hours of electricity savings annually.
By Marie Boran
