Another Yahoo Lands at Microsoft

[Photo: Simon Norfolk for The New York Times]

The swinging door at Yahoo! continues as today we announcedKevin Timmons has joined Microsoft’s Infrastructure Services Team (aka GFS).

I seem to talk more and more about GFS lately as our datacenters become pivotal to the future plans for online service delivery. Only last week I was explaining at the Search Summit how these information factories are as much a part of our future as Windows 7.

I also meant to mention the New York Times’ recent article titled Data Center Overload. It’s a great piece that highlighted how dependent we’ve become on these things we know very little about. Data silos in hidden field of the world, close to big energy plants. As that article points out in the first few paragraphs, we’ve become blasé about the 0.15 seconds it takes for Google to deliver search results or the storage of gigabytes of our personal data, backed up in the cloud. Where is this cloud of which you talk is what our elders ask and we point to the sky as if it’s some godlike manifestation. It’s just as likely to be over there in a field as up in the sky.

Until recently, I’d have agreed with Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge

 

“It’s like ‘Fight Club. The first rule of data centers is: Don’t talk about data centers.”

 

It was even like that internally until recently though I now have some solid friends in our GFS team and they’re sharing much more information through their blog and in public forum on things like PUE and how the industry can collaborate on data center design. Back at the NY Times article, how is this for a little gem of information…Microsoft’s Quincy data center could hold 6.75 trillion photos. Handy? Well it is when you’re building stuff like WorldWide Telescope.

Though the revolving door saw Mike Manos leave our GFS team recently I enjoyed the point he made in closing the NY Times article

 

Manos gestured to an electrical substation, a collection of transformers grouped behind a chain-link fence. “We’re at the beginning of the information utility,” he said. “The past is big monolithic buildings. The future looks more like a substation — the data center represents the information substation of tomorrow.”

 

I can imagine a time I’ll be driving along and as my Dad told me about energy substations, I’m sure I’ll be boring my offspring with information substations.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 22, 2009
  Love that picture. Wires all over. feels like heaven.