In the wake of its $7.2bn acquistion of Nokia, Microsoft has revealed plans to build a new datacentre in Nokia’s home country.
The company said it would invest more than $250m in capital and operation of the new datacentre over the next few years, “with the potential for further expansion over time.”
Few details have been revealed about the company’s plans for the datacentre, but it is clear that part of Microsoft’s strategy – like many of its competitors taking advantage of Northern European / Scandinavian climates – is to keep energy costs low and cooling efficiency up. Google recently transformed the Summa paper mill in Hamina, Finland into an advanced Tier 4 datacentre, using sea water from the Bay of Finland to cool its €350m facility.
It’s likely that the new datacentre will be used to provide European customers with access to the company’s Windows Azure IaaS platform, and help handle some of the traffic destined for its Dublin and Netherlands-based datacentres, where Azure is currently offered from. But it’s possible that the datacentre will also be used to provide Office 365 among other enterprise cloud services on offer from the Redmond-based software giant.
This year has seen Microsoft invest well over a billion dollars in its datacentre infrastructure globally. In June the company announced plans to pour close to $700m in an expansion of its Iowa datacentre, after announcing two new Azure-focused datacentres in Australia and another in Singapore.
[“Source- businesscloudnews”]
