At a conference in Las Vegas last week, Michael Manos, Microsoft's senior director of data center services, said in a keynote speech that the first floor of a data center being built by the software vendor in the Chicago area will hold up to 220 shipping containers, each preconfigured to support between 1,000 and 2,000 servers, according to various news reports and blog posts.
That means the $500 million, 550,000-square-foot facility in the Chicago suburb of Northlake, Ill., could have as many as 440,000 Windows servers on the first floor alone or up to 11 times more than the total of 40,000 to 80,000 servers that conventional data centers of the same size typically can hold, according to Manos. He was quoted as saying that Microsoft also plans to install an undisclosed number of servers on the building's second floor, which will have a traditional raised-floor layout.