The regularly chilly but increasingly industrialized city of Irkutsk will have Microsoft as a datacenter resident.
Microsoft seems to have an obsession with dropping datacenters into cities with nice cold winters. Dublin isn’t exactly known for its balmy January weather, and Chicago will never replace Boca Raton as a winter destination for the cold-averse.
Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge cited a couple of Russian publications touting Microsoft’s upcoming arrival in Siberia. Microsoft’s construction could happen somewhere between the southern Siberia cities of Irkutsk and Angarsk, according to the report.
The scale will be less than that of the other two datacenters in Dublin and Chicago. Power and Internet connectivity do not appear to be a problem, given that Microsoft touted energy stability as an asset in a Kommersant article.
With 10,000 servers, Siberia’s Microsoft outpost would have a tenth of what Dublin will support. But Microsoft’s datacenter should be the biggest one in Russia when completed, said CNews.
Microsoft’s choice of location boiled down to proximity to potential customers along with other factors, the report said. Irkutsk has the power and the telecom capacity to support connectivity to the datacenter.
Where those potential customers might reside on a geographic basis is another story. Irkutsk’s population density rates less than four people per square kilometer.
Perhaps Microsoft anticipates a lot of usage from Siberian visitors from the north, and Mongolians from the south. Or as one commenter on Slashdot suggested, maybe the deal is a quid pro quo arrangement between Microsoft and the Russian government: you crack down on software pirates, and we’ll invest in a datacenter in Siberia.
Stranger things have happened in the world.
