When Bing Maps users take advantage of aerial and satellite images, plus use of tools such as Streetside and Bird’s Eye view, they’re tapping into a world-class imagery data center site built on Dell’s very own designed Modular Data Centers.
Today we announced our work with Bing Maps to create a dedicated imagery processing data center to support the images Bing Maps collects and provides.
Microsoft’s intent with this project was to push the technological boundaries to build, in record time, a cost-effective and efficient data center. The ultimate product is a right sized high-performance data center that delivers complicated geospatial applications that can in effect ‘quilt’ different pieces of imagery into a cohesive mosaic that all users can access.
Our Data Center Solutions (DCS) innovators partnered with Bing Maps’ engineers and our networking partner Mellanox to deliver on Microsoft’s vision. The challenge was to design a modular outdoor solution that would weather the elements, was optimized for power, space, network connectivity and workload performance.
The Bing Maps data center leverages our innovative cooling approach, which uses free-air with evaporative cooling technology to help deliver world-class efficiency and could achieve Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) as low as 1.03. PUE is a measure of how efficiently a data center uses its power; specifically, how much of the power is actually used by the computing equipment (in contrast to cooling and other overhead).
In working with Microsoft, we’ve been able to produce a highly innovative, industry differentiated, and an impressively cost-effective data center to house their outstanding imagery offerings. Our DCS team, once again saw an opportunity to push the envelope on innovation and we’ll be using this experience to reproduce similar efficient solutions for key customers.
Below are time-lapse photos and video of this open-air deployment. I am extremely excited and proud of what our teams at Dell are able to produce when focused on solving customer problems.
We’re looking forward to taking customers to the site in Boulder, Colorado.
Do you have a question or comment about our work with Bing Maps? Post it here in the comments and join the conversation.