Microsoft wins 2013 Data Center of the Year Award from ICT Excellence for Dublin Facility

Christian Belady, General Manager
Data Center Services

Earlier this month, Microsoft's Ireland Data Center received the 2013 Data Center of the Year Award from Ireland's ICT Excellence. The 13th annual ICT Excellence Awards ceremony was held on May 16 in Dublin, Ireland, and recognizes the achievements of outstanding performers in Ireland's business technology sector. The Dublin data center was honored for demonstrating 'innovation, awareness of its environmental impact, integrated thinking, and how the facility needed to be developed to meet current and future needs.

The ICT Excellence award is the latest achievement for our facility that has received numerous accolades since it opened in 2009.  The Dublin facility is perhaps best known for using the mild year-round temperatures in Ireland to cool the facility.  By using the outside air instead of water for cooling, the data center uses less electricity and only 1 percent of the amount of water used by traditional industry data centers. Our latest expansion phase of the facility, which went live in 2012, features even more efficiently-designed collocation rooms that house rows of server racks deployed into pre-provisioned hot-aisle enclosures we call PODs. The newly designed PODs have further reduced building materials, and increased simpler deployment capabilities and optimized outside airflow throughout the facility.

The Dublin data center is a major European hub for the more than 200 Microsoft services and builds upon Microsoft's long-term investment in operations in Ireland. I'm proud of our Dublin operations and data center design team's efforts to drive efficiency and operational excellence, and look forward to sharing our strategies and best practices with others in the industry. 

For more on the Dublin facility, see the blog post from David Gauthier earlier this year.  

- Christian Belady, General Manager, Data Center Services